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| Part of what’s so frustrating about the Money, Forbes, PayScale and U.S. News rankings is that there are all sorts of other lists and all manner of other measurements that get little attention and that, in some cases, communicate information that’s equally or more relevant. You can look, for example, at which schools are producing the most Fulbright Scholars, and in October 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education did. It found that among small colleges, the top 10 performers recently were, in order, Pitzer, Smith, Oberlin, Pomona, College of the Holy Cross, Williams, Occidental, Vassar, Bates and Bowdoin. Only three of those schools—Williams, Bowdoin and Pomona—are on the list of top 10 national liberal arts colleges published by U.S. News in the fall of 2014.
Among what Fulbright classifies as “doctoral/research institutions,” which corresponds with “national universities” in U.S. News, the ten schools that recently produced the most Fulbright recipients included the University of Michigan (No. 2), Arizona State (No. 3), Rutgers (No. 5) and the University of Texas (No. 7). Only one of those public schools, Michigan, ranks in the U.S. News top 50 national universities. And yet all of them, on the Fulbright list, beat Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Duke and Stanford. Stanford tied with Ohio State, even though more Stanford students applied for Fulbrights than did Ohio State students. Why not look at which schools have the most students who do at least some study abroad? These kids presumably come back to campus with stories and perspectives that will enrich the entire study body, and the popularity of studying abroad may well say something about an institution’s signals to students and about their intellectual curiosity. U.S. News in fact compiles this data, which it doesn’t use in its rankings. But for what it’s worth, the ten schools with the greatest percentage of students who had ventured outside the country for part of their studies, at least according to information released by U.S. News in the fall of 2014, were Goucher College, Soka University of America, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, Centre College, Goshen College, Kalamazoo College, Pitzer College, Susquehanna University, Carleton College and Elon University. Along with those institutions, a dozen others sent a greater percentage of their students abroad than any Ivy League school did. Global university assessments are done by several organizations, which tend to focus on the output of an institution’s graduates, as measured by prizes, publications, patents. And there are schools in the United States that shine much brighter on these lists than they do in the eyes of American students fixated on certain brands. Among them: the University of California, San Diego; University of California, San Francisco; the University of Wisconsin–Madison; the University of Washington and the University of Illinois. These institutions don’t soar in the U.S. News rankings in part because of their sheer size and the big gap between their highest-achieving students and their lowest-achieving ones. They’re less exclusive. But what’s clear in the global rankings is that at each of them, there’s no shortage of top-notch scholars who find everything they’re looking for and more. And if the people around those standouts aren’t the survivors of a screening process as intimidating as Stanford’s, is that really a minus? With exclusivity often comes sameness, and there’s an argument that college shouldn’t take you out of the real world but thrust you into it, exposing you to places unlike the ones you’ve already inhabited and people different from the ones who’ve surrounded you thus far. There’s nothing in the formulas used by U.S. News, PayScale or most other organizations in the rankings racket that addresses that. And there’s no way a formula really could, because a school that will be old hat to a student from one background will be eye-opening to a student from another. The limited, dubious utility of rankings was summed up succinctly by the man who’s been in charge of the U.S. News list for several decades now. His name is Bob Morse, and in September 2014 he gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he jovially acknowledged that his rankings are “like the 800-pound gorilla in higher education” and shared his own thoughts on the relevance of a college’s reputation to a student’s future. “It’s not where you went to school,” he told the Post. “It’s how hard you work.” Morse got an undergraduate degree at the University of Cincinnati. His MBA is from Michigan State. Five Beyond the Comfort Zone “Be as curious as you can. Put yourself in situations where you’re not just yielding to what’s familiar. I came out of college with a level of confidence and self-understanding that I don’t think I could have possibly gotten from an East Coast school, where I would have been among the kind of people I grew up with and lived near.” —Howard Schultz, the chairman and chief executive of Starbucks and a 1975 graduate of Northern Michigan University From the tenth through twelfth grades, I attended a private school, Loomis Chaffee, in the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. Before then my siblings and I had always gone to public schools, but my parents grew nervous, as college neared, about whether they were giving us the very best chance of admission to the most selective colleges. Loomis was supposed to help. Most of the students there belonged to families in the upper-middle class or above. Most set their sights on one of several dozen elite private colleges in the Northeast. And those colleges, despite earnest stabs at diversity, tended to have disproportionate numbers of kids much like the ones at my private school. What these students found at college was a bigger theater and more intense work but not an unfamiliar milieu. College was an upsizing and extension of secondary school. It was initially going to be that way for me as well. The elite northeastern colleges were the ones mentioned most frequently and admiringly around my house. They were our quarry, and my parents were ecstatic when my older brother, Mark, went from Loomis to Amherst. They were equally thrilled when I applied successfully the following year for early admission to Yale. But before I had to commit to Yale, I was nominated for, and then received, something called a Morehead Scholarship. Financed by a foundation affiliated with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it sought (and still seeks) to lure students away from private colleges and to Chapel Hill by paying all of their expenses there, giving them access to special seminars and even funding summer internships and experiences like Outward Bound. I’d had my heart set on Yale, partly because it had always been held up as the point of my hard work at Loomis. It was the return on the investment, the validation. My parents were in a comfortable enough financial position to pay, without grave hardship, the bill for tuition, room and board, which would have been about $60,000 over four years. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $130,000 today.) But they weren’t so well-off that the figure was utterly negligible. They told me, repeatedly, to forget about the money. They insisted on it. But a part of me refused to. I didn’t want to be a person who could forget that so easily. I had never thought about applying to Carolina. But when I gave it a close examination, I realized what a strong reputation it enjoyed and how many excellent professors and departments it harbored. I also realized something else: It might well be a greater challenge for someone like me, given where it was and where I was coming from. I’d spent my childhood in upper-middle-class suburbs in New York and Connecticut and, if I discounted one trip to Virginia and maybe two to Florida, was wholly unfamiliar with the South. Chapel Hill took 85 percent of its student body from North Carolina, and that meant that the look, accent and vibe of the place would be nothing like Loomis’s—or Yale’s—and would be new to me. Chapel Hill threatened to make me uncomfortable, at least briefly and at the start. I worried about that and simultaneously came to believe that my worry was the best reason to go. So I went. Was it the right call? Would I be a more knowledgeable, happier, better person today if I’d made the opposite one? There’s no answer to that. The road not taken can never be anything more than a guess, a hypothetical. So there’s nothing solid to judge the road taken against. I can tell you that I have many regrets. They’re about the classes I didn’t take at Chapel Hill because I didn’t want to overburden myself; the classes I didn’t take because they conflicted with the soap opera All My Children; the classes I didn’t take because I didn’t want to get up before 8 a.m.; the lectures I skipped because friends could be counted on to share their notes; the study-abroad opportunities I didn’t seize; the people I didn’t push myself to meet; the people I wasn’t open or sufficiently kind to; the romantic relationships I cut short because I couldn’t respect anyone who respected me too readily; the number of fried-chicken biscuits I ate; the number of egg-and-cheese biscuits I ate; the bulimia I fell prey to for a while; the excess of time I spent in front of a mirror; the paucity of time I spent trying to improve my Italian; the frequency with which I indulged my newfound fondness for bourbon; and the fact that after getting my scuba-diving certification, I used it only once. I’d go back and change all of that. And I’d finish Middlemarch, An American Tragedy and Beowulf, all of which I faked having read. On second thought, I’d leave Beowulf be. But Chapel Hill? I wouldn’t take that back. It’s where I happened to learn that you could put blue cheese on a burger, which for me was like a first kiss. The sky in autumn and spring was the gentlest, rarest, most perfect of blues. I needed that solace, because I did initially feel out of place, but I also learned that out-of-place was endurable and that a person can play neat tricks with it in his or her mind, converting the dross to gold. I fancied myself an iconoclast. I fancied myself quirky. I took advantage of those times when I retreated from it all by reading and reading and reading, though not always what I was assigned. English was my major, and more than a few of the professors in that department were extraordinary. One, who specialized in twentieth-century English and American drama, allowed me into two of his graduate seminars, where I marinated in Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee and Sam Shepard. The school newspaper was an ambitious one, and once I found my way there, I also found an enduring posse. There and elsewhere at the university, I was among people who took much less for granted than the kids at Loomis had. And it wasn’t just because all of us were now a few years older, a few years less reckless and naive. It was because the in-state kids at Chapel Hill hadn’t, as a group, come from backgrounds as economically privileged as my prep school peers. My younger brother, Harry, ended up going to Dartmouth. My sister, Adelle, the youngest of us four, went to Princeton. Mark’s, Harry’s and Adelle’s closest college friends had second homes on Caribbean islands or the slopes of North America’s prettiest mountains and had enough of a financial safety net under them to do things like follow the Grateful Dead around all summer long. My closest college friends had part-time jobs off-campus to help pay for their tuition or to pick up some of the spending money that their parents couldn’t lavish on them. It wasn’t that Chapel Hill had much grit to it; if anything, it had too little. But it seemed to hover closer to the earth than my siblings’ schools did. And it gave me a perspective that I appreciated then and appreciate even more now. I did wind up taking a spin through the Ivy League, attending Columbia for nine months in the service of a master’s degree in journalism. The Columbia name, I concede, was part of what lured me, and a teacher I had there connected me with my first full-time position, at the New York Post. But the Post hired me only after, and because of, a four-week tryout, the success of which had less to do with the classes I’d taken at Columbia than with the writing I’d done at the UNC newspaper and on the side. And none of the people who hired me for subsequent jobs ever asked about or mentioned Columbia—or, for that matter, Chapel Hill. Among the young men and women I interviewed for this book were a few Yale alumni, including Rebecca Fabbro, who graduated in 2009. She headed to Yale from the wealthy New York City suburb of Edgemont, which shares a zip code with Scarsdale, and from a high school whose college counselor was savvy enough to press her to get some high-level physics and computer science on her transcript, telling her that girls with those leanings stood out. Rebecca said that her one qualm with Yale was how many other students there were like her, in the sense that their passages to Yale had been smoothed by the advantages of growing up in an affluent or relatively affluent family. That qualm has grown stronger over time, partly because Rebecca spent two years after Yale working for Teach For America in a public school in Marks, Mississippi, once the starting point of the “mule train,” a 1967 trek to Washington to protest the poverty in which so many black Americans were mired. Rebecca said that when one of her seventh graders learned that she’d gone to Yale, the student said, “Oh, are you rich?” She told me about an email that she’d received from Yale’s president in the fall of 2013 about the class of 2017, whose members were starting just then. It praised their variety of backgrounds, noting proudly that “over half attended public schools.” That boast stuck with Rebecca, because the more she thought about it, the odder and less boast-worthy it seemed. “Given that most students in this country (nearly 90%) attend public schools, I was surprised that having more than 50% of a Yale class coming from a public institution was a mark of diversity to celebrate (especially since many of those students who attend public schools attended affluent ones like Edgemont and Scarsdale),” she wrote to me in a long email shortly after we’d spoken. As it happens, Yale had posted some information online about that very same incoming class, and I checked it, discovering that the percentage of public school kids was 57.6. From the same post I learned that 13.8 percent of the class of 2017 had some kind of legacy connection to the university, a situation that hardly abets diversity. Rebecca said that she’d dug into some literature that Yale had sent her over time and had also done some other research, and she’d learned that 52 percent of students at Yale receive some level of need-based aid, a figure in which the university takes pride. But, she wrote in her email, “It concerns me that 48% of students at Yale are not on need-based aid. Given that nearly all families who make between $0 and $200,000 a year qualify for financial aid and that ‘many families who make more than $200,000 a year receive some need-based aid,’ that means (unless I’m reading the stats wrong) that nearly half of all Yale students who accept Yale’s offer of admission are coming from families who make more than $200,000 per year. So, around 50 percent of Yale students are from families in the top 5 percent in this country.” Her deconstruction reminded me of a column written by a Harvard alumnus, Evan Mandery, that the Times published in April 2014. He, too, was troubled by what he saw as insufficient socioeconomic diversity at elite schools. “To be a 1 percenter,” Mandery wrote, “a family needs an annual income of approximately $390,000. When the Harvard Crimson surveyed this year’s freshman class, 14 percent of respondents reported annual family income above $500,000. Another 15 percent came from families making more than $250,000 per year. Only 20 percent reported incomes less than $65,000. This is the amount below which Harvard will allow a student to go free of charge. It’s also just above the national median family income. So, at least as many Harvard students come from families in the top 1 percent as the bottom 50 percent.” Rebecca’s focus on figures like these wasn’t motivated simply by questions of justice and fairness, though those concern her. She was wondering as well about the educational implications of a school so rife with children of wealth. “I have certainly learned more in more diverse environments than in others,” she wrote. “When I was making my college decision,” she added, “I was concerned with prestige. Smart, successful people from my school went to places ranked highly by U.S. News and featured prominently in the Times’s wedding pages. I wanted to be like them. I also wanted to make my parents proud. “But I had very little conception of the world outside the one in which I had grown up,” she wrote. “And most students from the school I went to did not attend very socioeconomically diverse institutions.” They could have looked at a broader universe of schools. They also could have consulted rankings other than the ones by U.S. News. For instance, the magazine Washington Monthly does some of its own, which are devoted to the “contribution to the public good” that schools make, and these receive minimal attention. They try to gauge the promise of social mobility that schools offer, and they do this—imperfectly, I concede—by looking at the high percentages of poor kids admitted and how many of them are successfully ushered to diplomas. They also reward schools at which many kids do community service or go on to the Peace Corps or participate in ROTC. By those measures, the top 10 national universities as of the fall of 2014 were, in order, UCSD, UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, UCLA, Stanford, the University of Washington, the University of Texas at El Paso, Case Western Reserve University and Harvard. And the top 10 liberal arts colleges were Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Berea, Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Reed, Macalester, the New College of Florida, Williams and Oberlin. Needless to say, that lineup was a departure from the one showcased by U.S. News. In the news media, I’m noticing more and more attention to the subject of how much colleges are (or aren’t) doing to identify, recruit and retain students from poor and middle-class families. It’s a clear and laudable outgrowth of the intensifying concern over income inequality in the United States. Along these lines, the Times crunched numbers and, in September 2014, published what it called a College Access Index, evaluating and ranking schools according to the percentage of students who qualified for federal Pell grants, which are reserved for low-income families, and the net price being paid by students whose families weren’t affluent. The Times looked only at “top colleges,” which it defined as those whose four-year graduation rate was at least 75 percent. The schools that scored highest on the index were, in order, Vassar, Grinnell, UNC Chapel Hill, Smith and, in a tie for fifth place, Amherst and, actually, Harvard. Even more interesting were the discrepancies between schools. According to the index, Washington University in St. Louis has a remarkably less economically diverse student body than Pomona does, and Princeton—which held the top U.S. News spot for national universities in 2013 and 2014—lags far behind Harvard and Columbia. Yale trails Princeton. Wake Forest does poorly; so does George Washington University. I wonder how many prospective college students see this kind of information. I wonder if more than a few even go looking for it. They should, and I say that not out of some politically correct, reflexively liberal concern for the concept of diversity, though diversity has a whole lot going for it. I say it because a diverse campus is going to be truer to the grand, messy chaos of life and less like the deceptive nook into which the circumstances of your birth tucked you. Vassar’s president, Catharine Bond Hill, explained her push to recruit and admit low-income students—and to have a student body varied in all kinds of other ways as well—in terms of not just what’s best for the kids trying to climb the ladder but what’s best for every student at the school and what honors the mission of education. “If our students are going to make successful contributions to the future well-being of our society, they need to understand how to deal with diversity, and college campuses are a perfect place—an important place—to learn that,” she told me. Students from affluent families who attend a truly diverse school may be more likely to “understand that the rest of the United States hasn’t grown up in the same circumstances that they have, and they might think about whether that’s a fair society,” she said. Whatever they conclude, it’s an essential question to mull. Even from a purely careerist viewpoint, she added, there’s an argument for diversity on campus. “I think that just about anything you’re going to go on to do for the rest of your life—be a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher—you’re going to be dealing with people very different from the kids you’ve gone to high school with, and understanding that is going to make you more successful when you go forward.” Those people invariably widen your frame of reference. Maybe they test you, too. Perhaps they even knock you off your stride. If so, that’s a good thing. Howard Schultz saw it that way. He didn’t go to a school that he knew to be especially diverse, and he wasn’t looking to make sure that poor kids were in the mix: He was one of those poor kids. But he went to a college that was a complete, abrupt departure from his high school and from everything he’d known until that point. It unsettled and disoriented him, at least at first. And that was perhaps its greatest blessing, he said. “Here’s this Jewish kid from Brooklyn who lands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Schultz, the chairman, president, and chief executive of Starbucks, said, recalling his journey in the early 1970s to Northern Michigan University. “I was the only Jewish kid in my dorm. I remember hearing so often, ‘I’ve never met anyone who’s Jewish.’” His tone of voice as he recounted this for me wasn’t bitter or astonished. It was amused, fond, even grateful. While he often jokes that he might have really amounted to something if he’d gone to an Ivy League school, he of course doesn’t believe that. Northern Michigan, he said, served him well, and in ways that aren’t easily measurable and don’t translate into catalogue-ready copy. Simply going to college was an event and thrill for him, because neither of his parents had been able to take their education that far. As he was growing up, his father suffered through a sequence of jobs that he didn’t like much and that didn’t pay well, at one point driving a truck that delivered and picked up diapers, the smell of which made every workday a misery. The family of five—Schultz has a sister and a brother—lived in the projects. Schultz remembers occasionally being told by his mother to answer the phone and to say that his parents weren’t home, even though they were. They were trying to avoid a bill collector. They wanted more for him and his two siblings, both younger. “My mother drilled in us that we were going to college, come hell or high water,” he told me. College was the way out, the ladder up. But there wasn’t much chatter at home or among his friends at Canarsie High School about where to go to college. Nor was he sure how to pay for it. So when a football recruiter who had come to one of Schultz’s high school games and had seen him play quarterback asked him if he’d be interested in a scholarship to Northern Michigan, he said a relieved yes and moved enthusiastically in that direction. In Schultz’s autobiography, Pour Your Heart Into It, he writes that his family’s road trip during his last semester of high school to see the campus in Marquette, Michigan, was his first time out of New York State. At Northern Michigan he majored in communications. He joined a fraternity. He didn’t, in the end, play football, at least not for long: An injury prevented him from making the kind of contribution that he’d hoped to. The scholarship went away, and he had to take out loans and work part-time. He tended bar. He even on occasion sold his blood for money. He put enough energy into his studies to maintain a B average, but not enough to do any better than that. His graduation, he said, was one of the happiest moments of his mother’s life—but she didn’t attend the ceremony. The trip out would have cost more money than she and his father felt they could spend at the time. In the end, he said, what mattered most about college was that he “came of age” there, getting a glimpse of a world far beyond Brooklyn and being forced to stand on his own two feet in it. In this sense he sounded a lot like Parsons—and he provided another reminder of how fundamentally different the college experience is for kids who can’t count on Mom and Dad for frequent visits or generous handouts. That difference is often termed a disadvantage, a bit of nomenclature that should probably be revisited. It’s a burden, no question. It’s not something most parents would elect for their kids or most kids would volunteer for. But it winds up steeling some young people in ways that can actually prove advantageous. It’s how their resolve is forged. Schultz said that he drew particular strength from his success navigating terrain that was an adjustment, to say the least. “I was in farmland,” he said. “All the kids I was meeting were from the Midwest: Michigan, Ohio, Illinois.” And he was as exotic to them as they were to him. “If you are part of a very diverse background of young adults, both inside and outside the classroom, I think the experience adds significant value to the kind of person you’re going to be,” he said. “I’m not saying that that doesn’t exist at an elite school, but when you go to a state school that doesn’t perhaps have the same patina or reputation, the opportunities to expose yourself to things outside the classroom provide a different kind of education.” As I listened to Schultz, I longed more and more for a robust, sustained national conversation about the ways in which all college students, and in particular those at exclusive institutions, navigate their years of higher education and what they demand from that chapter of life. And I yearned for that largely because college has the potential to confront and challenge some of the most troubling political and social aspects of contemporary life; to muster a preemptive strike against them; to be a staging ground for behaving in a different, healthier way. We live in a country of sharpening divisions, pronounced tribalism, corrosive polarization. We live in the era of the Internet, which has had a counterintuitive impact: While it opens up an infinite universe of information for exploration, people use it to stand still, bookmarking the websites that cater to their existing hobbies (and established hobbyhorses) and customizing their social media feeds so that their judgments are constantly reinforced, their opinions forever affirmed. And college is indeed a “perfect place,” as Catharine Bond Hill said, to push back at all of that, to rummage around in fresh outlooks, to bridge divides. For many students, it’s not only an environment more populous than high school was; it’s also one with more directions in which to turn. It gives them more agency over their calendars and allegiances. They can better construct their hours and days from scratch—and the clay hasn’t yet dried on who they are. But too many kids get to college and try to collapse it, to make it as comfortable and recognizable as possible. They replicate the friends and friendships they’ve previously enjoyed. They join groups that perpetuate their high school cliques. Concerned with establishing a “network,” they seek out peers with aspirations identical to their own. In doing so, they frequently default to a clannishness that too easily becomes a lifelong habit. If you spend any time on college campuses, you’ll notice this. And you’ll understand why one of my utopian fantasies is a student orientation period in which students are given these instructions, these exhortations: Open your laptops. Delete at least one of every four bookmarks. Replace it with something entirely different, even antithetical. Go to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and such, and start following or connecting with publications, blogs and people whose views diverge from your own. Conduct your social lives along the same lines, mixing it up. Do not go only to the campus basketball games, or only to campus theatrical productions. Wander beyond the periphery of campus, and not to find equally enchanted realms—if you study abroad, don’t choose the destination for its picturesqueness—but to see something else. Think about repaying your good fortune by mentoring kids in the area who aren’t sure to get to college, or who don’t have ready guidance for figuring it all out. In some American studies classes at Columbia University, this is a course requirement, and there are similar arrangements and programs at other schools. It’s a trend that’s worth tilling, a movement that should grow. Now more than ever, college needs to be an expansive adventure, propelling students toward unplumbed territory and untested identities rather than indulging and flattering who they already are. And students, along with those of us who purport to have meaningful insights for them, need to insist on that. Six From Tempe to Waterloo “I’ve had students who’ve had transformative experiences at schools that nobody’s ever heard of.” —Alice Kleeman, the college counselor at Menlo-Atherton High School in California With colleges as with so much else, we have an unfortunate tendency to peddle in stereotypes, and Arizona State University suffers from an especially negative one, which was captured by its description on the College Confidential website as “a party school and you will always be just a number there.” That’s what a student who identified herself only as AZseniorchick wrote not long ago. She also opined that Northern Arizona University was “for hippies and ugly people.” What a shame that she didn’t proceed, school by school and cactus by cactus, through the whole state. Her eye is as keen as her judgments are subtle. Arizona State, better known as ASU, has long fought against a factory-like impression given by its size. With some 60,000 students enrolled at its main campus in Tempe and another 13,000 or so at nearby satellites, it’s the largest single-administration university in the United States. (There are university systems, with different administrations for different branches, that are bigger.) It has also struggled against its location in “a place with bright sunshine and palm trees and beautiful weather,” as Michael Crow, its president, described it in an on-camera interview for the 2014 documentary Ivory Tower, about higher education in America. There’s a broad assumption that no one can really study when it’s summertime almost all of the time. ASU’s meteorological blessing is its reputational curse. Ivory Tower includes footage of kids at ASU drinking and dancing. One of them shouts, “It’s the party school! Come on, what are we doing right now?” Another exults, “It’s paradise, baby! What’s not to love?” There are also images of the annual “undie run” on the last day of classes, which looks like the kind of fitness regimen Hugh Hefner might prescribe, and there’s an onscreen reminder of ASU’s 2011 ranking by Playboy as the No. 3 party school in the nation. Over the last decade, it has toggled into, out of and around Playboy’s top 10. The typical ASU student “comes to get drunk out of their minds and be in this sort of like vapid, hedonistic area,” a senior identified as Brendan Arnold says in one scene in Ivory Tower. He’s cut off by someone who approaches him and shouts something unintelligible. The impression is of beery bedlam in the desert. Bring Ray-Bans, Coppertone and Advil. But that’s not the ASU suggested by its multiple appearances on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of young movers and shakers that I mentioned earlier in the book. And that’s not the ASU that Wendy Zupac experienced. Wendy, now twenty-seven, is the only child of two electrical engineers who immigrated to the United States from Serbia just before she was born. In their field, your actual skills and what you technically knew were more important than the source or even the fact of your diploma, and in Tempe, where they settled and raised Wendy, elite schools weren’t mentioned as incessantly and anxiously as in the moneyed suburbs of New York, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles. Besides which, an elite college’s yearly price tag of about fifty thousand dollars back when Wendy was in high school struck her parents, and her, as extravagant. Although Wendy was an A student who took many Advanced Placement classes and could have tried her luck with any number of colleges around the country, she wanted to go to ASU, where her in-state tuition would be around six thousand dollars a year and she could keep other expenses down by living at home. “My plan was to go to a really good law school, and I felt I could get there through ASU,” she said. “A lot of law schools will publish annual statistics of their incoming class, and one of the things that struck me was how the law schools I was looking at admitted kids from all kinds of undergraduate schools. I also knew that things like LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs were important, and I knew I’d be focusing on that at any school I went to.” She worried somewhat about too many lectures in miniature auditoriums with hundreds of students, but she often found herself in seminars with fewer than twenty students, thanks in part to her admission into the Barrett honors college within ASU. Unbeknownst to kids who don’t take a serious look at public universities, many of them have programs like Barrett that enable the most academically accomplished students to take more advanced and adventurous courses. But Barrett wasn’t the only reason Wendy encountered class sizes smaller than she’d expected. More than 40 percent of classes at ASU have fewer than 20 students; only 17 percent have 50 or more. “If you were self-directed, you could do all kinds of things when you were there,” Wendy said. “It was surprising how easy it was to find a group of people who were truly motivated, and professors responded really well to those students. I could walk into a professor’s office at any time and they’d be happy to see me.” She developed an especially close relationship with Jack Crittenden, who teaches political theory. He got his doctorate at Oxford, has won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and has written three books that explore the confluence of politics and psychology, Beyond Individualism, Democracy’s Midwife and Wide as the World. Wendy remembers taking at least four of his classes, including one or two at the graduate level. She was also allowed into other graduate classes and into several classes at the law school. She took many more classes than she needed to and ended up completing three majors: political science, history and Spanish. The sun didn’t distract or deter her. And she got into her first-choice law school, Yale, beginning there in the fall of 2009. She told me that she didn’t find herself to be any less well prepared for Yale than kids who’d gone to smaller, more selective colleges. After her graduation from Yale in 2012, she clerked for a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, then took a job with a big, prestigious litigation firm in Washington, D.C. “I love it so far,” she said. A friend of hers from the honors college at ASU, Devin Mauney, twenty-eight, is clerking for a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. All four of his years at ASU were paid for by a Flinn scholarship, which is given to outstanding Arizona high school students who elect to stay in the state for college. Because of the Flinn, Devin did precisely that, though he’d been accepted at Yale and Brown, among other schools. He told me that while most of his peers endorsed his decision, one close friend thought it was cracked. I asked Devin why. “He just repeated the words Yale and ASU to me,” Devin said. “He didn’t have much more than that. It was mostly about prestige.” I asked Devin if he had any of his own misgivings or worries along those lines. “My first semester of school, I certainly doubted my choice,” he said. “I had set my sights on prestige in high school, and walking around school in my ASU shirt, I thought, ‘What if I were at Yale?’ And it seems silly now, because I’m happy with the way things worked out. And I wasn’t unhappy then! And I didn’t think I was getting a bad education. I was challenged. I had access to great opportunities and resources.” One aspect of his ASU education that he particularly appreciated was how permeable, even nonexistent, the barrier between the Tempe campus and the community around it was. The school wasn’t just located in Tempe and in Arizona; it was entwined with them. “I was involved in politics in Arizona during the entire time I was a student at ASU,” he said. “I testified at the legislature a couple of times, one time about a bill aimed at limiting academic freedom. I ran a local campaign for a candidate running for county office. My friends who went to prestigious places weren’t involved that way. These places that draw students from all over the country are islands.” He majored in economics, graduated in 2009 and, in the fall of 2010, began law school at Harvard. In terms of where his fellow Harvard students had done their undergraduate work, he said, “My class was extremely diverse: University of Georgia, lots of students from the UC system, lots of UT students, Michigan.” I asked him whether he’d noticed much of a difference between them and classmates who’d gone to more selective schools. He said that it was difficult to generalize but that in a few cases, the alumni of elite institutions were less clear about why they were at Harvard and what they wanted from it. For them it was the next box in a series that they were dutifully checking over the course of their lives. They were also more likely to be from the Northeast, he said, and to have attended private schools before college. ASU will never be a badge of exclusive honor, because its very composition, identity and mission work against that. It’s intended to be accessible and to try to counter, and change, the fact that in the United States, according to one study from a few years ago, fewer than 10 percent of children from families in the bottom quartile of income are likely to get a college diploma by the age of twenty-four while more than 70 percent of children from families in the top quartile are. To that end, ASU basically admits any high school graduate in Arizona who maintains a B average or better in sixteen courses considered essential for college readiness. The average ASU student pays only about $3,800 a semester for tuition. And more than 40 percent of the school’s students receive federal Pell grants, a form of tuition aid available only to lower-income families. ASU sacrifices the kinds of attributes that impress prospective college students eager for a discerning club, and it throws in the towel on statistics that move the needle on rankings like those done by U.S. News. Its undergraduate acceptance rate is more than 80 percent, so it doesn’t get points for selectivity. Its four-year graduation rate is below 40 percent and its six-year graduation rate is under 60 percent, both of which are similarly damning even though they’re entirely understandable: Studies show a close correlation between low family income and the probability that a student who starts college doesn’t complete it. “We live in a country where the number one predictor of college success is not intelligence or hard work—it is student zip code,” Michael Crow, the president of ASU, wrote to me in a letter in the summer of 2014, during which we had several exchanges, by mail and in person and over the phone. When I brought up U.S. News rankings, which in the fall of 2014 put ASU at No. 129 among national universities, he said, “They hammer us because of our graduation rate, and we’re not able to be viewed as a top institution because we don’t have these rising admissions standards.” But the school’s emphasis on access and inclusivity means that it’s potentially doing much more than any elite college to improve the social mobility that’s central to our country’s narrative, that’s at the core of America’s self-image and that’s imperiled in this era of increasing income inequality. Who wouldn’t want to go to a university with such laudable values? And while the student population at ASU may not be a model of geographic diversity, it’s an exemplar of socioeconomic and ethnic diversity. “If you come to ASU, you’ll have the whole cross section of our society,” Crow told me. “And you’ll have them at scale, not just two Native American kids but several thousand. We make that case, but you’ve got to be a very sophisticated seventeen-year-old to grasp all of that.” And ASU, like many universities of its size, has no shortage of distinguished professors and programs for students who summon the initiative to connect with them. As of the summer of 2014, the school’s faculty included two Nobel laureates, 10 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 11 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 Guggenheim Fellows and five Pulitzer Prize winners. Almost all began teaching there after 2002, an indication of the school’s vigorous efforts to upgrade itself. But because of its party-school stereotype, you don’t hear much about that. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal did a survey of recruiters at 479 of the largest public and private companies, nonprofits and government agencies, asking them which schools they liked best and trusted most when they were looking for college graduates for entry-level jobs. ASU ranked fifth. But because of its party-school stereotype, you don’t hear much about that, either. Or about its high rank among schools producing students who win Fulbright grants. There are reasons to be envious, not suspicious, of ASU’s size. “We don’t limit what you can study,” Crow said, noting that thousands of classes are offered annually. “The student has—I won’t call it infinite—a menu of opportunity beyond any menu they can imagine.” There are three hundred degree programs in fifteen colleges, “and in those micro-environments, you find your niche,” he explained. For example, he said, “You can be in our opera program inside the school of music inside the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.” And as Wendy Zupac and Devin Mauney attested, you can be completely satisfied with your education and what it leads to. The difference between the negative image and the promising reality of ASU suggests just how perniciously superficial assumptions factor into the appraisal of schools and the esteem in which the general public, along with minimally informed applicants, holds them. Elite colleges don’t have all the best teachers, students and facilities, though their endowments certainly help them attract or construct a disproportionate share. What elite colleges really have is a set of carefully maintained characteristics that are broadly accepted as synonyms for quality, along with a history of acclaim that it’s easier for parents and children to buy into than to examine and question. What elite colleges have is a consensus, along with the benefit of the doubt. Schools like ASU don’t have that, and I’ve singled it out and dwelled on it for that reason, but also to illustrate just how ridiculously narrow the thinking about higher education can be, especially by parents and kids with enough resources and ambitions to be finicky about the schools they consider applying to. The same cast of colleges gets the same bounty of adulation year after predictable year, and students in certain geographic areas and socioeconomic groups draw up lists of target colleges that are comically redundant and sadly unimaginative. There’s so much more out there. There are big schools like ASU with pockets of moderately priced excellence less recognized than they should be. Texas A&M, for example, has a weekly business seminar unlike any other I’ve ever heard of. Every semester for about nine years now, it has been taught by Britt Harris, a wealthy financier who served as the chief executive of Bridgewater Associates when it was one of the world’s largest hedge funds. He’s not an academic, and the class, called Titans of Investing, wasn’t put together, and isn’t conducted, in a conventional fashion. Although it covers market history and economic theory, it concerns itself just as much with questions of leadership, and of wisdom: recognizing it, acquiring it, using it. To that end, the seventeen participants in the class—juniors, seniors and graduate students—read and discuss an eclectic mix of books specifically suggested by American business bigwigs, including Wall Street giants, several of whom interact with the students by fielding and assessing their written analyses of those classics. One week, the class might dive into Moby-Dick or de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The next, it’s on to a biography of Benjamin Franklin or Steve Jobs. Discussions are followed by long dinners promoting fellowship and sustained reflection, and the course’s alumni aren’t just encouraged, but pretty much required, to form an ongoing professional network. A good friend of mine spent the fall semester of 2014 as a visiting professor at the University of Wyoming, with which she’d been wholly unfamiliar, and was blown away by the university’s deep funds (thanks to the state’s oil and gas wealth), the sophistication and training of its faculty, and the international diversity of its graduate students, most of whom interact extensively with undergraduates, sharing their worldviews. My friend was teaching in the Global & Area Studies Program, and when she went to a retreat sponsored by the program at the start of classes, she found herself tangled in a back-and-forth between a professional soldier from India who was taking a break to get a master’s degree and a graduate student from Kenya; they were debating and discussing marriage practices in their respective cultures. Three visiting scholars from Shanghai at the retreat were still getting accustomed to Wyoming’s chill and altitude. One of two female students engaged in a game of checkers was blond, blue-eyed and from Wisconsin; the other was from Tunisia and wore a headscarf. Nearby, a Californian just back from several years in Taiwan chatted with a Moroccan who was teaching in the school’s Arabic program. At the University of Wyoming my friend also met two professors, a married couple, with doctorates from Cambridge University and a herd of wagyu cattle that they raised on their nearby ranch. She crossed paths with a sociologist from Sweden who’d begun her career as a detective with the Stockholm police department. And the class that my friend herself was teaching included a graduate student from Turkmenistan and another from Strasbourg, France. “This is in Laramie, Wyoming!” my friend marveled—a city of about thirty-two thousand people in the least populous state in America. “Everyone I meet here is interesting. I hope these students understand how privileged they are.” As she said that, I smiled. She’d invoked “privilege” in a way that it’s too seldom used in conversations about college, but she’d done truer, fuller justice to the word. There are also scores and scores of small institutions with distinctive strengths and one-of-a-kind wrinkles. But these colleges, like the University of Wyoming and ASU, are overshadowed and routinely overlooked as too many families chase the heralded brand, the envied address. They’re looking for some imagined jackpot, and in their tunnel vision, they’re not seeing any number of out-of-the-way opportunities and magical possibilities for four stimulating years that none of us ever gets back. Did you know that there’s a New Jersey school with a behavioral psychology course that takes place largely among the land and sea mammals at the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement and safari park? It’s Monmouth University, in West Long Branch, and a few years ago a psychology professor there, Lisa Dinella, took her own children to the park and realized that the trainers’ testimonials about animal behavior had significant overlap with her campus lectures. So she devised a new class at Monmouth that includes weekly meetings with trainers at Six Flags and fieldwork with the animals. It has been offered twice over the last three years. Did you know that there’s a New York school with a dormitory of yurts? Yes, yurts, those cylindrical Mongolian tents. The school is St. Lawrence University, in the upstate town of Canton, and I’m stretching by using the word dormitory, but not by much. St. Lawrence offers a program every fall called the “Adirondack Semester,” and it’s for a small group of students who elect to live in a yurt village in Adirondack Park, about an hour’s drive from the campus. There’s a lake and a thick canopy of pine trees, but no wireless. No electricity. No Chipotle. The students learn survival skills and make their own meals, largely with provisions from a nearby farm. And as they adapt to the wilderness, they contemplate its meaning and man’s stewardship of it through a menu of courses on such topics as environmental philosophy and nature writing. At Denison, in Granville, Ohio, there’s an academic concentration in bluegrass music, designed by a professor with an upstairs-downstairs history of fiddling. He performs frequently with the Columbus Symphony; he has also repeatedly won the Georgia State Fiddle Championship. DeSales University, a Catholic school in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, has established an internship program with the Vatican that sends as many as six students to clerical and communications positions there every year. St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin, maintains a close relationship with the Green Bay Packers football team, including regular visits to the campus by players and internships with the Packers organization for students. Webster University, near St. Louis, emphasizes internationalism and has so many residential campuses in so many different countries, including Thailand and Ghana, that a student could study in a different place with a different language and culture almost every semester. It also had the top-ranked collegiate chess team in the United States in 2013 and 2014. Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, is a veritable staging ground for doctorates and, since 1920, has had more graduates go on to earn PhDs than any other liberal arts college of its size. Speaking of which, the National Science Foundation ranks colleges by how high a percentage of their graduates go on to get PhDs in science in particular, and many of the top spots are claimed by small liberal arts colleges, including Reed (No. 4), Swarthmore (No. 5), Carleton (No. 6) and Grinnell (No. 7). S. Georgia Nugent, who was the president of one such college, Kenyon, from 2003 to 2013, told me: “There would always be parents who would come with their prospective students and say, ‘We love the college, but Billy really wants to major in science.’ In fact, the small colleges are much more successful at producing STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) bachelor’s graduates, and they’re disproportionately successful at having those people go on to earn PhDs in the STEM fields.” Nugent’s experience and perspective are interesting: She spent an earlier span of her career teaching at Cornell, at Brown and—for many years—at Princeton, where the jobs she held over time also included assistant to the president and associate provost. Kenyon exposed her to a more intimate academic environment, and she got an additional education into life well outside the Ivy League through her work, both at Kenyon and since then, with the Council of Independent Colleges. It includes Kenyon, Denison, St. Lawrence and more than 600 other small and midsize independent liberal-arts colleges and universities that are, in almost all cases, less widely venerated than Princeton, Brown and Cornell. And she has come around to the firm conviction that for undergraduates, they’re ideal environments: especially approachable, uniquely nurturing. She said that each has a much greater bounty of programs than its size might lead an outsider to expect. And she noted that the colleges as a group present an extraordinary spectrum of options, with distinctive colors for individuals who take the time to notice. For instance Luther College, a school in Decorah, Iowa, that’s affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, has proven to be a surprisingly sturdy cradle for winners of some of the most prestigious academic prizes. Although it has an endowment of only $116 million and just 2,500 students at a time, it has produced eight Rhodes scholars and, since 2009, sixteen Fulbright scholars. I could fill ten paragraphs this way. I could fill forty or four hundred or an entire book. Despite all the challenges facing higher education in America, from mounting student debt to grade inflation and erratic standards, our system is rightly the world’s envy, and not just because our most revered universities remain on the cutting edge of research and attract talent from around the globe. We also have a plenitude and variety of settings for learning that are unrivaled. In light of that, the process of applying to college should and could be about ecstatically rummaging through those possibilities and feeling energized, even elated, by them. But for too many students, it’s not, and financial constraints aren’t the only reason. Failures of boldness and imagination by both students and parents bear some blame. The information is all out there. You just have to look. These failures aren’t anything new. There have long been schools that dominated the discourse and schools left inexplicably outside of it. I’ve marveled for some time over the fact that when I was in secondary school and people all around me spoke incessantly about the options beyond graduation and what some of the better or more interesting ones were, I never once heard anyone mention St. John’s College. And while I’ve lived at least briefly in more than a half dozen states and interviewed thousands of people across scores of professions, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who went there, or at least told me that he or she did, or brought it up as a school worth fantasizing about or prodding one’s children toward. Yet it’s a fascinating, fierce, one-of-a-kind institution. At its two campuses, in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, each with fewer than five hundred students, the relentless focus is on Great Books and great thinkers and the Western canon: the Greek philosophers, the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Rousseau, the Declaration of Independence, Eliot, Twain. St. John’s is about classic erudition, timeless discipline and rigorous thought. Students don’t get formal grades but rather face-to-face oral appraisals, done on the basis of their participation in tiny classes and on their many written papers, which substitute for tests. In surveys, they say they adore the school and feel wholly satisfied. Both the Annapolis and Santa Fe campuses have been mainstays on the list of Colleges That Change Lives, which originated with a 1996 book of that title that sought to showcase and exalt lesser-known schools outside the Ivy League. It embraced the idea that at a certain point of selectiveness, a college is corrupting its mission and skewing its identity in a manner that doesn’t serve a true education. And it hinges on the belief that no one college, no matter how celebrated, is right for anyone and everyone who can gain admission there. A school, like a dress or a suit, has to have the contours and colors that work for the person choosing it. It has to fit. When I spoke with guidance counselors, I often asked which colleges had proven to be spectacular experiences for the students sent off to them. I heard kind words about Stanford, about Brown, about Johns Hopkins. But I heard equally kind, if not kinder, words about the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio, which requires students to do an ambitious independent study project in their senior year; about Butler University, in Indianapolis, whose theater program drew praise; about Indiana University, especially for music majors; about DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana, which has upgraded its campus significantly over recent years; about the University of Rochester, in upstate New York, which has strong science instruction. Alice Kleeman, the Menlo-Atherton High School counselor, singled out Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. It’s somewhat famous as a progressive alternative to traditional schools, with narrative evaluations instead of grades, a pronounced attention to environmental issues and a student body of nonconformists. Kleeman said that when a boy from Menlo-Atherton who went there came back to visit her after his freshman year, “I almost didn’t recognize him, because of the confidence that he’d gained, because he’d finally found a place where other students shared his interests and where people weren’t judged in the same way they’re judged in the college admissions process. He had friends. He stood up straighter. He had a whole new image of who he was, because he’d chosen a college that was a really great match for him. If you’d picked him up and dropped him into Harvard or Stanford, it just wouldn’t have worked.” Each college-bound student has his or her own needs, and there are schools that are likely to meet them and schools that aren’t. David Rusenko determined that Carnegie Mellon, which had accepted him, fell into the latter category. So he chose to go to Penn State instead. He wanted the frat parties, the football games, the crowds. And that wasn’t because he gravitated naturally to those. The opposite was true. But his goal was to change, to stretch, to become more, to become different. He’d had an unusual upbringing in an unusual world, and now was the time to round out the picture. His parents, English teachers, had raised him abroad, first in France and then, from the time he was seven years old, in Casablanca, Morocco. They’d actually started an English-language high school there. It was tiny, an island in an exotic sea. He was one of its students. In his graduating class in 2002, there were all of eleven others. “At Carnegie Mellon,” he said, “kids would be super-smart, I’d learn a lot and there was a computer science angle.” All of which was good; computers were his strength and his interest. But he worried that he would emerge from Carnegie Mellon as “an unsociable nerd who wasn’t going to have the people skills he needed to succeed. “I was a quiet kid,” he said, “and I figured it would be critical for me to pick up people skills. My thinking was that people skills, soft skills, play such a critical role if you’re going to lead people. And it was always my desire to start a company.” So at Penn State he made it a point to stray from the classroom, to mingle, to get a taste of Greek life. And he indeed developed into a more outgoing, articulate, chattier guy. “Fraternities are a microcosm,” he said. “You can learn a lot from them.” He benefited from his academic experiences, too. The school had just begun a special computer sciences major that focused not only on technology but on working in teams, giving presentations: the sorts of talents necessary for entrepreneurs who are trying to sell investors on their product and trying to rally employees toward a goal. “The theory behind the program was to develop more well-rounded technologists,” he said. “I probably gave more than sixty presentations over the years.” He benefited from Penn State in yet one more way, meeting and becoming friendly with two fellow students there who shared his ambitions. With them he developed Weebly, a service that guides people through the creation of websites. They started it in 2006. By 2009 it was profitable. And in 2014, it received a fresh infusion of $35 million from Sequoia, a venture capital firm that valued it at $455 million, according to Rusenko, twenty-nine, who is its chief executive officer and now lives in the tech utopia of San Francisco. Rusenko said that Penn State had served him well, that fancier schools don’t necessarily leave people in better stead, and that I should talk with Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, which is arguably Silicon Valley’s most famous and influential source of first-step seed money for tech startups. Y Combinator had given Weebly its initial funding and has done the same for nearly 750 other young companies, out of thousands more who have developed and pitched ideas. Altman, Rusenko said, would have a sense of whether the graduates of elite schools were especially good at proposing and developing successful ventures. So I called him. Altman, also twenty-nine, went to Stanford but never finished, because he and a classmate founded Y Combinator instead. He said that Stanford, by introducing the two of them, had blessed him, and he loved his time there, among what he described as “a density of smart people.” But, he added, “to my chagrin, Stanford has not had a really great track record.” He meant that most of the proposals that Stanford students and grads had brought to Y Combinator didn’t hold much promise and pan out. He noted that Y Combinator’s biggest success, Airbnb, was started by graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. I asked him if any one school stood out as a source of students and graduates whose ideas sparkled and winded up doing Y Combinator proud. “Yes,” he said, identifying an institution that hadn’t sired supernovas like Airbnb but that had an unusually good track record of exciting ideas worth funding. “The University of Waterloo.” It’s a public school in the Canadian province of Ontario with more than thirty thousand students. “I try not to travel very much, but I’m going to spend three days there this fall just to meet more students,” Altman said when we spoke in July 2014. “They train really great engineers. Waterloo came up enough times that I thought: ‘I really have to go there.’” He has paid visits to schools before, of course, but none, ever, for three whole days. The list he gave me of successful startups that could be traced to Waterloo was eight ventures long: Thalmic Labs, BufferBox, Pebble, PagerDuty, Vidyard, PiinPoint, Reebee and Instacart. Altman told me that in his opinion, the importance of attending an elite school “is going down, not up,” because there are avenues to entrepreneurial success that don’t involve submitting a transcript and flaunting your academic bona fides to a graduate school or a corporation. “Now a lot of the best people are not taking those paths out of college,” he said. “They’re doing a startup or doing something else.” And they’re judged, he said, by the existing work that they can point to, the examples they can show. “Did you contribute to an open-source project? Did you create a video that did well on YouTube? Now you can answer how good you are with the Internet. It’s a showcase for people. You can read about them on Twitter. You can look at what they’ve built. “Writers get book deals based on the quality of their blogs,” he added. “Anyone can produce content. Anyone can make it available. And good work gets shared and then rises to the top. Before, there was no way for that to happen. Whoever had connections got their book published. Whoever had connections got their startup funded.” His vantage point is Silicon Valley, which isn’t entirely representative. There are still plenty of freshly minted graduates hitting up companies for employment in a more old-fashioned way. But what those companies want isn’t entirely predictable and may not be Stanford, which brings me back to that Wall Street Journal survey of employers, the one that ranked ASU fifth as a source for entry-level hires. The schools that ranked first through fourth were Penn State, Texas A&M, the University of Illinois and Purdue. Sixth through tenth were the University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, the University of Maryland, the University of Florida and Carnegie Mellon. The only Ivy in the top 25 was Cornell (No. 14). Seven An Elite Edge? “I think there’s a conceit, a myth, that you can go and sit in a university and things will come to you. They don’t. You have to go to them.” —Condoleezza Rice The Wall Street Journal survey that lifted Penn State, Purdue and the University of Maryland so high isn’t a full and accurate portrait. It requires a few qualifications and explanations, which the Journal story that accompanied it provided or at least suggested. Recruiters weren’t exactly saying that students from the schools that they put at the top of the list were better educated and more intellectually nimble in some overarching sense, or that they had brighter careers ahead of them. The recruiters were saying that when it came to filling entry-level jobs that require discrete skills, state universities had proven more reliable pools of eager workers with specific, relevant training. In an uncertain era of unusually high unemployment for young men and women just out of college, that’s worth noting and heeding. But so, in fairness, are a few other realities. For example, certain firms are more likely to visit and interview students at highly selective schools than at the Journal survey’s top five. A few of these firms may go to those highly selective schools alone. They’re trying to put a cap on the amount of time, manpower and money that they devote to recruitment, and they’re regarding and taking advantage of the rigorous admissions processes at elite colleges as a prescreening that has whittled down an unwieldy universe of potential hires to a manageable group of finalists who can be presumed to possess some baseline of drive, poise and intelligence. To that end some of the richest banks and funds on Wall Street and some of the most highly paid consulting firms have developed close, sturdy relationships with Harvard, with Princeton, with the University of Pennsylvania. And once a critical mass of people from an elite school set up shop somewhere, they tend to bring aboard yet more people from that school, because it’s a place they have pride and faith in, because the compliment they’re paying to the school is a form of self-validation and because they and their new hires all share points of reference, speak a common language and are products of the same culture. In rocky marriages, familiarity breeds contempt. In finance, law and other fields, it can breed comfort and job offers. That’s undeniable, and so is the disproportionate presence of alumni of highly selective colleges at revered graduate schools—in business, law, medicine and other disciplines—that can be magnets for recruiters and springboards to some of the best-paying jobs. Wendy Zupac, Devin Mauney, Peter Hart and other interview subjects of mine who went from state universities to Ivy League law or business schools said that they met plenty of people there like them, but they also said that the fraction of their fellow students who’d been to the most selective undergraduate schools seemed to be at least slightly higher than the fraction who’d been to less selective public colleges. The elite graduate schools don’t routinely publicize information analyzing the undergraduate alma maters of their students, but the Yale Law School did precisely that in 2013 and again in 2014, looking at all of the hundreds of young men and women at various stages of study there. Just over 40 percent of them had gone to the eight schools in the Ivy League. Seven of those eight—all but Cornell—were among the ten colleges that had sent the most alumni to Yale Law. In contrast, graduates of state schools represented well under 20 percent of the student body—and that was even when you counted the many graduates of top-ranked public universities like UC Berkeley and UCLA at Yale Law. My sense from scattered data is that the distribution of students at top business schools and in other graduate programs isn’t nearly as flattering to the Ivy League as that snapshot from Yale Law. But whatever the case, there’s a crucial caveat about how to interpret the composition of Yale Law and how to think about several studies that have suggested that graduates of elite colleges earn more across their lifetimes than graduates of less elite ones. It’s obvious, and it’s this: Did the elite college make the Yale lawyer and the robust breadwinner, or do the characteristics and priorities of a Yale lawyer and a robust breadwinner dovetail with the characteristics and priorities of a person who aims for the elite college and studiously and diligently succeeds in putting together the sort of high school resume that wins over the admissions committee there? Because this question is ultimately unanswerable—how do you design a study that builds in the right controls?—it’s too seldom asked whenever big, sweeping assertions about education and earnings are made. It’s left on the curb. Take the recent discussion and documentation of the enormous income gap between college graduates and others. There’s no doubt that much if not most of that gap is attributable to skills picked up in college or the greater confidence an employer will have about a college graduate. Many employers won’t look at someone without a college diploma, even if it’s not specifically necessary for the position being filled. But some of the gap is almost certainly attributable to variables that aren’t products of a college education but are merely associated with it. A person’s odds of graduating from college rise exponentially if he or she comes from a family of means, and people from such families probably have more connections to draw on, greater confidence about their fitness for lofty jobs, bigger expectations and a host of privileged experiences throughout their youths that point them in a propitious direction. College graduates may have more discipline, or at least discipline of the right kind. College didn’t create it, but getting to and through college reflected it, and that same discipline could be essential to hunting down a good job, keeping it and being promoted over time. And similar dynamics could well be at work in any discrepancy between the achievement levels of elite-college alumni and the achievement levels of graduates of less selective schools. A 2011 study done by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who served for two years as the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Stacy Dale, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research, tried to adjust for that sort of thing. Krueger and Dale examined sets of students who had started college in 1976 and in 1989; that way, they could get a sense of incomes both earlier and later in careers. And they determined that the graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7 percent greater than graduates of less selective colleges, even if the graduates in that latter group had SAT scores and high school GPAs identical to those of their peers at more exclusive institutions. But then Krueger and Dale made their adjustment. They looked specifically at graduates of less selective colleges who had applied to more exclusive ones even though they hadn’t gone there. And they discovered that the difference in earnings pretty much disappeared. Someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn State but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn. It was a fascinating conclusion, suggesting that at a certain level of intelligence and competence, what drives earnings isn’t the luster of the diploma but the type of person in possession of it. If he or she came from a background and a mindset that made an elite institution seem desirable and within reach, then he or she was more likely to have the tools and temperament for a high income down the road, whether an elite institution ultimately came into play or not. This was powerfully reflected in a related determination that Krueger and Dale made in their 2011 study: “The average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.” When I interviewed Krueger, he explained: “The students are basically self-sorting when they apply to colleges, and the more ambitious students are applying to the most elite schools.” The inclination to consider UPenn, not attendance at UPenn, is the key to future earnings. Or maybe it’s the inclination coupled with assertiveness and confidence, two other attributes suggested by the fact of applying to a college or colleges where admissions are fiercely competitive. “Another way to read my results is: A good student can get a good education just about anywhere, and a student who’s not that serious about learning isn’t going to get much benefit,” Krueger told me. There was, though, one wrinkle to the findings. Krueger and Dale found that even after their clever adjustment, minority students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds still seemed to make out better, in terms of income, if they’d gone to more selective colleges. The two researchers theorized that for these students, the networking opportunities at selective colleges were more important than for other students, who had access to fruitful networks apart from the one established in college. I don’t believe it’s right or especially useful to view and evaluate colleges primarily as bridges to riches, but even a kid who is approaching higher education that way would be wise to look less at the names of institutions and concentrate more on what he or she plans to study. Majors make a greater difference. In one recent study, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce determined that the median annual earnings of college graduates who’d chosen the most lucrative major, petroleum engineering, was more than four times higher than the median of college graduates who’d chosen the least lucrative one, which was counseling/psychology. The likelihood of simply being employed varies just as greatly with major. Graduates who’d studied pharmacology had a 100 percent employment rate. Graduates who’d studied social psychology had a 16 percent one. “It matters a lot less where you went to college than it used to,” the Georgetown center’s director, Anthony Carnevale, told me. “What really drives your earnings is your field of study. If you go to Harvard and become a schoolteacher, you’re not going to make more than another schoolteacher who didn’t go to Harvard.” But even your major recedes in importance once you’ve been out in the workforce for a while and have an actual performance to be judged by, a track record to be assessed. In early 2014, Gallup released the results of a nationwide poll in which business leaders were asked to characterize the importance of four different factors when making hiring decisions. Those factors were the amount of knowledge a job candidate had in a particular field, a candidate’s “applied skills,” a candidate’s college major and where a candidate had received a college degree. They could characterize each as “very important,” “somewhat important,” “not very important” or “not at all important.” Field-relevant knowledge was by far the employment criterion that business leaders most frequently called “very important.” Nearly 85 percent of them described it that way. But where an applicant had gone to college? Only 9 percent of the leaders described that as “very important.” Interestingly, the same Gallup survey showed that average Americans’ impressions of how business leaders made hiring decisions were different from what those leaders said. Nearly one in three respondents indicated a belief—erroneous, if the leaders’ own answers were trustworthy—that where a job candidate had gone to college was very important. As Rusenko’s success and Altman’s comments suggest, the tech world in general and Silicon Valley in particular may be the most vivid arenas in which ideas and know-how muscle educational pedigree out of the picture. This was captured in two 2014 columns in the Times by my colleague Tom Friedman that promptly went viral. Titled “How to Get a Job at Google” and “How to Get a Job at Google Part 2,” they contained many insights and pieces of advice from Laszlo Bock, the supervisor of all of Google’s hiring. As recounted by Friedman, Bock paid no particular heed to prestigious colleges. “To sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one—besides brand-name colleges,” Friedman wrote. “Because ‘when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.’ Too many colleges, he added, ‘don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life.’ “Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like GPA,” Friedman continued, later adding: “Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about—and pays off on—what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills—leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.” I got that same message from Parisa Tabriz, whom I reached out to because she’d appeared on that 2013 list of 30 Under 30 in Forbes. She’d found her way to Google from the University of Illinois, where she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science. Now thirty-one, she manages Google’s Chrome Security Team and is involved in the hiring for it and for other security teams at Google. “When I look at candidates’ resumes, whether they have a degree or not is a data point, but I’ve never been especially interested in where they got a degree,” Tabriz said. “I’m much more interested in what kinds of organizations they’re involved in. I work in information security—finding security bugs, making software more secure—and I’m looking for experience doing that, which they wouldn’t do in a classroom.” They might do it, she said, in their free time, as a hobby. Or maybe while they were at school, they participated in some special, outside-of-class research project along those lines. That’s what matters to her. That’s what moves her. “My experience at Google has really made me question how necessary a university degree is in the first place,” she said. “If you have access to the Internet, you can teach a lot of this stuff to yourself. I have a Polish engineer—he’s brilliant—who taught himself English by reading engineering manuals and participating in community forums and panels on the Internet. A degree in computer science isn’t worthless, but getting an A in computer science doesn’t mean you’re a good programmer.” Well beyond Silicon Valley, many employers talk about trying to size up potential employees in ways that get beyond the window dressing of diplomas. Stuart Ruderfer, who runs a large marketing agency in Manhattan, told me that he’s less concerned with the prestige of an applicant’s college than with his or her GPA, which is often a barometer of how goal-oriented and hardworking someone is. He’s also impressed when he sees or hears about aspects of an applicant’s involvement in campus life: Did he or she run an organization? Stage an event or fund-raiser that was wildly successful? Pull off some difficult project? And Ruderfer pays careful attention to how applicants present and comport themselves in an interview. That’s a harbinger of what they’ll be like to work with, both for colleagues and clients. “If you’re looking only at the elite schools, you’re going to miss some very talented people,” Ruderfer said. “There are a lot of reasons why people go and don’t go to the elite schools. There’s money, geography. In some cases, people were perhaps not as focused in high school, so they don’t have the grades or such, but then they get to college and they turn it on with a level of intensity that, for whatever reason, they hadn’t turned up earlier in their lives. But they’ve got it now. And that’s what you want. That intensity is going to be a much bigger factor in their success.” The longer a person has been out of college, the less relevant a college is to an employer. By the time someone is forty years old, it probably doesn’t matter at all, but even by thirty-five or thirty, there’s a whole new body of information to judge him or her by, and it’s what most employers will choose to judge. “Demonstrated success and a track record relevant to the need we’re trying to fill is far more important to me than where someone went to school eons ago,” said Kevin Reddy, the chief executive officer and chairman of Noodles & Company, a Colorado-based chain of restaurants that’s one of the biggest success stories of the last few decades in what’s called the “fast casual” space. Kevin has the ultimate say in hiring the chain’s senior management. His own rise didn’t involve elite schools. It did involve an entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic that predated college and can’t be taught. When he was eleven years old, he struck up a conversation one day with the man who delivered milk and eggs to the houses in his suburban Pittsburgh neighborhood. The man complained that the eggs were his fragile enemies, because they could break so easily and thus prevented him from moving too quickly as he made his rounds. Kevin told the man that for a modest fee, he’d take the eggs off his hands and deliver them himself to all of the houses near his family’s. He’d just put them in his wagon and be sure to pull gently on it. “I wanted to earn a little money,” Kevin said, “so I could buy a baseball glove.” His parents weren’t particularly well-off, so Kevin always worked. He took a job at McDonald’s when he was fifteen. “It was growing and advertising a lot, and there were several that were reasonably close to my house and I could get there quick enough. I told them, ‘Here’s my school schedule, here’s my sports schedule, other than those times, I’ll work whenever you want.’ When I was that young, I wasn’t allowed to cook on the grill, so I cleaned the dining room, cleaned the bathrooms. I worked the shake machine. Gradually I made it to the point where I could get to the grill.” During his last years of high school he spent up to twenty hours a week at McDonald’s, and he continued to devote the same amount to McDonald’s during college, although by that point he had managerial responsibilities and, in his junior and senior years, worked in the corporate offices. It helped pay his college expenses. He went to Duquesne University, a Catholic school near Pittsburgh. “I lived at home, because I couldn’t afford to live in the dorms,” he said. He majored in business and accounting, but when I asked him to recall a class that had held particular meaning for him, he mentioned one outside of those areas. It was called Marriage and Family Relationships and taught by a priest. “He had this constant theme about not overreacting and not underreacting in times of stress,” Kevin recalled. “And he said that you can’t really argue with, debate or change somebody’s mind if you don’t understand their belief system, and so you really need to listen. For all walks of life, that was very sound advice. Let’s face it: The business world is about relationships. You’ve got to have intelligent people. But once you understand the intellectual plan and you’ve analyzed it, you still have to bring it to life. And you bring it to life through relationships, through being able to work with people.” Kevin said that while he honed those skills in college, he didn’t need a college of any particular altitude to do that, and he’d honed those skills at McDonald’s as well. “There’s so much more than raw intellect if you’re going to influence people and accomplish things, and I don’t think you can map it all out as some of the Tiger Moms are trying to,” he said. “In the short run, college opens doors. But I think real success, enduring success, in life, in any arena, requires substance, and that substance is much more about what people do every day than where they went to school or where they grew up. It’s a function of choice and persistence and being a student of life. Once you get out of college, so much of life is being able to relate to people, to influence people, to take risks, how well you listen. I don’t think people’s real character and real skills shine until they’ve been doing something for a long time, had their asses kicked and had to get up off the ground a few times.” When he’s hiring, he’s asking not only whether a candidate has precisely what the position needs but also, he said, “What kind of person are they? Are they genuine? Do they respect other people? Are they passionate?” He can sometimes sense that from interviews. He can sometimes glean it from references, or from noting the sequence of jobs that the candidate has held over time, the frequency and manner in which he or she has been promoted. But from the college a person attended? Not really. Not usually. Shortly after I spoke with Kevin, I had a conversation with Bradley Tusk, someone I first met nearly fifteen years ago, when he was the communications director for U.S. senator Chuck Schumer of New York. Since then he’s been a deputy governor for the state of Illinois, a senior vice president with Lehman Brothers, a special assistant to Mike Bloomberg when Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, and the manager of Bloomberg’s 2009 reelection campaign. He currently runs Tusk Strategies, a political and strategic consulting firm based in New York City. “Over the last twenty years,” Tusk said, “I’ve hired hundreds and hundreds of people.” And while he himself went to UPenn for college and the University of Chicago for law school, he said that he has not found that elite schools are any guarantor or predictor that someone will turn out to be a great employee and excel. “In most jobs, there’s a base level of intelligence that’s needed, and after that, success is typically determined by other factors: work ethic, hustle, instincts, communication skills, street smarts, character, creativity, persistence. I haven’t seen any evidence that going to an elite school inherently means you have any of these skills (other than work ethic). And I’ve found that people who’ve had to struggle a little will often develop more of these skills—especially persistence—and they also don’t have the same kind of entitlement and expectations you sometimes see from employees from top schools. “So at least based on my experience in government, politics and business, I haven’t seen any particular reason to focus our hiring on students from elite schools,” he summed up. Then he laughed, because it occurred to him that he had recently made three offers for senior jobs to people in their thirties and, he said, “I don’t know where any of them went to college. I think I know where one of them went, but I’m not sure. The two others? I have no idea.” Toward the end of 2013, in mid-December, Gallup and Purdue University announced a partnership, supported by funding from the Lumina Foundation, “to conduct the largest representative study of college graduates in U.S. history.” The study was christened the Gallup-Purdue Index, and its goal, according to the initial press release, was to “measure the most important outcomes of higher education—great careers and lives that matter—and provide higher education leaders with productive insights.” The index is a telling indication of just how consumed Americans have become with the question of college: why it costs so much; whether its returns warrant the investment; how it can best be used to students’, and the country’s, advantage. “As it finally did in K–12, an accountability era has begun for higher education,” said Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue and the former two-term governor of Indiana, upon the unveiling of the project, which would quiz college graduates about what was described as “five key dimensions of well-being: purpose, social, physical, financial and community.” In May 2014, the first annual report, based on a survey of more than thirty thousand graduates, came out. The headline on the summary distributed to the news media: “It’s Not ‘Where’ You Go to College, But ‘How’ You Go to College.” “There is no difference in workplace engagement or a college graduate’s well-being if they attended a public or private not-for-profit institution, a highly selective institution, or a top 100-ranked school in U.S. News & World Report,” the first paragraph of that summary proclaimed. Right out of the gate, Gallup and Purdue confronted the obsession with elite colleges, and right out of the gate, they confronted the unwarranted obeisance to U.S. News. They understood the era, and it was as if they were taking aim at a mass psychosis. The report didn’t measure graduates’ salaries: a poor stand-in for achievement and a flawed, irrelevant predictor of happiness. Instead it measured their own professed satisfaction with their jobs. Its separate (though related) verdict on their well-being was cobbled together from those key dimensions, meaning how much the respondents said that they liked what they were doing (purpose); how supportive they found the relationships in their lives (social); whether they felt healthy and energetic (physical); whether they felt that they were managing their economic lives in a way that made them less stressed and more secure (financial); and whether they felt connected to, and proud of, the places where they lived and spent most of their time (community). Depending on their own assessments of these criteria, they were characterized as thriving, struggling or suffering. According to the report, which will be revisited annually over a five-year period, student debt had a significant impact on well-being and workplace engagement. Graduates with between $20,000 and $40,000 in loans, which the report defined as the average student loan debt, were much less likely to be thriving than graduates without any loans to repay. People’s lives were improved if, in college, they’d found some sort of academic mentor. “For example,” the report said, “if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being. “And if graduates had an internship or job where they were able to apply what they were learning in the classroom, were actively involved in extracurricular activities and organizations, and worked on projects that took a semester or more to complete, their odds of being engaged at work doubled also,” the report said. In other words, the nature and quality of the time spent in college—including, as it turned out, the major someone chose and the efficiency with which he or she zipped toward a diploma—were paramount. Employed graduates who’d majored in the arts and humanities or the social sciences were slightly more engaged at work than those who’d majored in science or business. And graduates who’d finished school in four years or less were much more likely to be engaged at work than those who’d taken longer. But the clout or selectiveness of the college, so long as it was not-for-profit, had little bearing on graduates’ contentment, with tiny exceptions. One of them, interestingly, was that graduates of smaller schools were less likely to be engaged at work than those of schools with full-time undergraduate populations of ten thousand or more. Was this a matter of causation or correlation? That’s impossible to say, and it’s a question smartly asked about all of the findings of this report and many others. How you use college. What you demand of it. These dynamics get lost in the admissions mania, which overshadows them, to a point where it makes them seem close to irrelevant. But their importance is vividly underscored by the histories of just about every successful person interviewed for this book. I think back to Peter Hart and his involvement at Indiana University in both its business fraternity and a modest real estate enterprise of his own; to Jenna Leahy and her short trips to Mexico and long ones across the Atlantic to study abroad; to Condoleezza Rice and her lust for extracurricular involvements, along with her habit of arriving to office hours early, with flattering comments at the ready; to Bobbi Brown and her creation of a nonexistent major that she could get truly excited about; to David Rusenko and his strategy for plucking precisely what he needed from Penn State. I also think of Jillian Vogel, twenty-four, who did a thorough job of maximizing her four years in college precisely because she didn’t end up where she’d hoped to and was determined to turn the consolation prize into something more, into the trophy itself. Brown University had been her dream, and it hadn’t seemed to her like such an impossible one, given that she was in the top 5 of roughly 100 seniors at a selective, well-regarded public school in New York City. She applied to Brown for early admission, was deferred and had a good guess why, because her guidance counselor and others around her had warned her about the problem. She’d scored only 24 out of 36 on the ACT. After Brown deferred her, she resolved to charm the gatekeepers there into accepting her during the general-admission period in the spring. She drew and sent them a comic strip of all the stuff she’d been up to since she’d first applied. She wrote and mailed them a letter, which she addressed to that cursed 24 on the ACT. “Dear Composite Score,” it read. “It has come to my attention that you are unimpressive. While you represent the hours in a day, the title of a television drama and the product of 3 times 8, you are not an ideal ACT score. I have only a hazy memory of the Saturday morning of your conception, as it was so long ago.” It said that back then, “I could not foresee what you would represent and the amount of power you would come to hold over me,” and it took issue with that power, arguing that her mind and her potential couldn’t be distilled into two measly digits. At the bottom of the letter, Jillian had a dozen of her teachers sign their names in support. “That’s 12 signatures,” she wrote, “to compensate for the 12 points” between her 24 and a perfect 36. Brown did not admit her. Nor did Middlebury, Tufts or Emory. “I felt so rejected,” she told me. “I’ve never felt that kind of rejection before.” She ended up with a choice between the University of Vermont and UNC. She headed to the South, feeling lucky to have Chapel Hill but still feeling the sting of not being wanted by all of those other places. She turned that sting into resolve. She sprang into action. She sought the most interesting classes that she could find, some of them intensive, some of them offbeat, and she wheedled or stormed her way into them. One of the most beloved seminars in the English department, with just twelve to fifteen students per session, was a fanciful exploration of style and usage called Gram-o-Rama. Students in it composed songs, dances, skits and pieces of performance art that were devoted to, or showcases for, the fine points of grammar and wordplay. It was reserved, supposedly, for kids on a creative-writing track; Jillian was a communications major. But she’d met the professor. She pleaded with her. And it worked. With a ruminative essay about growing up kosher, she also managed to get into a word-of-mouth class about food science and food culture for students in the honors program, which she wasn’t even a part of. Limited to fifteen kids, it had an extraordinarily ambitious, encyclopedic syllabus of books and magazine and newspaper articles about everything from overfishing to obesity. It welcomed a who’s who of guest speakers. It included a long weekly dinner at the professor’s house off-campus, and it culminated in a five-day trip to the Bay Area replete with visits to several of San Francisco’s most famous restaurants and to a vineyard in the Napa Valley. Jillian said that if she wanted an exhilarating experience or an academic challenge at UNC, “I could find it. It just took a little more effort. I was extremely satisfied there, but it took everything I had to make it happen. I couldn’t be passive. I had to be proactive.” And she carried that gumption back to New York with her, pressing it into the service of a job hunt that led, ultimately, to a position recruiting and developing talent for CollegeHumor Media, an online entertainment company that produces and curates comedic skits, pictures and articles aimed at a young audience. Then again, she had that gumption all along. It was abundant in her entreaties to Brown, and while it didn’t get her an invitation there, I suspect that it will have more to do with what happens to her through the years than will anything else, including which college she went to. The best that college, any college, could do was to draw on it and to draw it out—to give it even more muscle. UNC accomplished that, and UNC taught her, or reaffirmed for her, that you have more options than you initially think you do, if you hunt for and insist on them. In fact at UNC she discovered and took advantage of something most students there are oblivious to: If there’s a course at nearby Duke University that fits into what you’re studying and isn’t replicated at UNC, you can make arrangements, space permitting, to take it. She did that for a lecture class on contemporary documentary filmmaking. It was terrific, she said, largely because renowned documentarians would drop in to address the roughly 150 students. But many of those students wouldn’t even pay much attention, she said. “Everybody in the classroom had their computers on and Facebook up,” she recalled. “And it was like: What are you guys doing? This person is talking to you!” She got the feeling that Duke students had become accustomed, even numb, to the kinds of special opportunities that UNC students appreciated more. “Maybe I’m just seeing what I wanted to see,” she told me. “But I’d sit there and I’d think: Don’t take this for granted, guys.” Eight Strangled with Ivy “Presidents, deans and professors rarely tell students simple truths, for example that the strategizing and diligence that got them into the college of their choice may not, if followed thoughtlessly, lead to an adult life they will find worth living.” —Harry Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, the undergraduate wing of Harvard University, in his 2006 book, Excellence Without a Soul While the advantages of going to an elite college aren’t questioned as often as they should be, the disadvantages are even less frequently broached, perhaps because a great many people can’t imagine that there’d be any. William Deresiewicz can. He’s devoted no small part of the last decade to grappling with and articulating them. He does this provocatively, but with some standing and credibility: From 1998 to 2008, he taught English at Yale, and for six years before that, he was a graduate instructor at Columbia University, which is where he got his undergraduate degree, his master’s and his PhD (in English). In other words he’s frolicked in the Ivies. Only he doesn’t make it sound so frolicsome. In 2008, as he left Yale, he published an essay in the American Scholar titled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” “Our best universities,” said an introductory summary of the essay, “have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.” This was the seed of a book, Excellent Sheep, which was in turn previewed, just before its publication in August 2014, in the New Republic. The magazine found even sexier language for Deresiewicz’s perspective, because that’s what magazines do. “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” read the headline that it slapped on the preview. No equivocation. No qualifications. And the subhead cannily appropriated a booming pop culture trend, warning: “The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.” Bolt your doors and say your prayers. They’re on the loose—the flesh-eating hordes from Haverford, the walking dead from Williams. What Deresiewicz dwells on, and what’s so important to keep in mind, are some themes I mentioned earlier in this book, for instance when exploring Rebecca Fabbro’s dissatisfactions with Yale, Howard Schultz’s satisfactions with Northern Michigan University and the philosophy behind Washington Monthly’s evaluation of schools: There’s ideally a whole lot more to higher education than a springboard to high-paying careers, and an elite school composed almost entirely of young men and women who have aced the SATs or ACTs isn’t likely to be the most exciting, eclectic stew of people and perspectives. It doesn’t promise to challenge extant prejudices and topple old expectations. And that’s largely because there’s a surfeit of students who traveled to their elite destinations on an on-ramp of familiar perks and prods. “When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the BA; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine,” Deresiewicz wrote in the New Republic. And in the American Scholar, this: “Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous.” He added that because the schools also “cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.” He cited Al Gore and John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominees in 2000 and 2004 respectively, “one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.” Their successor, Barack Obama, was capable, sort of, but even his route to the Ivy League wasn’t consistently hardscrabble, and it didn’t give him an automatic rapport with working-class Americans. He attended a private secondary school in Honolulu, called Punahou. It’s arguably the best known and most exalted in Hawaii. Deresiewicz observed that the students at an elite school are prone to vanity, because they are constantly told that they are the chosen, their presence there a testament to how special they are. “There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail,” he wrote. “From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.” If you think that sounds like an exaggeration, I’d point you to an acceptance letter from Lawrenceville, a New Jersey prep school that feeds the Ivy League and presages the affirmations that flow so freely there. It came to my attention after its recipient posted it on Facebook. Dated March 10, 2014, it read: “This is the moment a door opened to reveal an educational journey that can shape the rest of your life. Welcome to Lawrenceville. Welcome to the next chapter in your life as a Lawrentian.” It proceeded to praise “the remarkable sense of balance our students possess” and to ask its recipient, “Are you ready? We think so, and so do your future classmates.” The heart flutters. Goose bumps rise. Deresiewicz expressed additional concerns. He said that at elite schools you find “the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls,” which means that no one is ever challenged all that mightily or held to stern account, and many students settle into a complacent mediocrity. This, he said, is embodied in the man who kept both Gore and Kerry from the presidency, George W. Bush, who attended both Yale (undergrad) and Harvard (business school). And Deresiewicz’s plaint didn’t end there. He fretted about a lack of imagination and a dreary careerism in the students at elite schools, which don’t challenge those leanings but, rather, instill or amplify them. And he contended that the homogeneous group of overachievers who make it to Princeton or Yale have, to that point, known only one triumph after another, largely because they’ve been given extensive preparation to master precisely those tasks that the elite educational track values. They can be strangely weak, not strong, as a result. It’s one hell of a laundry list, and I heard some of the same worries expressed by other educators who’d worked at highly selective schools. I saw bits and pieces of his lament all over the place. “I think we’re really screwing them up badly in the long run,” said Bruce Poch, the former admissions dean at Pomona, referring to the way in which kids who wind up at elite schools are pointed in that direction from an early age, monitored ceaselessly by their jittery parents and made to believe that a great job and a contented life are a matter of faithful adherence to a program. “These kids are not equipped to get knocked on their tail. At Pomona, one of the things I got really nervous about was looking at these kids who’d had nothing but success. There was a stunning fragility to some of them. The parental bubble wrap and the boot camps got them to their one and only goal in lives,” a top-ranked school. Once there, they’re sort of frozen, adrift. And they respond by taking cues from the herd and following what they believe to be the script, because script-following is precisely what they learned to do, and script-following is what got them this far. Act I was admission. Act II is heading in a professional direction deemed worthy of the elite school whose name will be stamped on their diplomas. This means a direction that’s reliably lucrative. They avoid risk, because they can’t brook the possibility of failure. They conform. In Excellent Sheep Deresiewicz charts the grim ascendance of economics as a major—and finance or management consulting as careers—for a shocking percentage of young people who attend the most highly selective colleges. He writes that while economics was the most popular major at only three of the top 10 national universities in U.S. News and three of the top 10 colleges in the mid-1990s, it has tended to reign supreme at 26 of the top 40 schools—the top 20 universities combined with the top 20 colleges—over recent years. There have also been recent years, he writes, when nearly half of students graduating from Harvard and more than half of the students graduating from the University of Pennsylvania have gone into consulting or finance, while more than a third of students graduating from Cornell, Stanford and MIT did so. In 2011, more than a third of Princeton’s graduates went into finance alone, he reports. And the focus on just a few professions means the neglect of so many others. “Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science,” he writes in Excellent Sheep. A lack of imagination and a fear of experimentation constrict, rather than expand, their opportunities. That same viewpoint is expressed in a small study published in May 2014 by three researchers with an initiative called the Good Project, which is housed within the graduate school of education at Harvard. The authors conducted interviews with forty members of Harvard’s undergraduate class of 2013 during their final, senior year. And they concluded that a Harvard education had “a funnel effect.” “Though students enter college with a diverse set of interests, by senior year, most of them seem to focus on a narrow set of jobs,” the authors wrote. “The culture at Harvard seems to be dominated by the pursuit of high earning, prestigious jobs, especially in the consulting industries.” In students’ minds, only some jobs “live up to the degree.” The authors noted that one of the seniors had done some teaching and had loved it, but she eschewed the classroom for “a job at an education-consulting firm,” because it felt “more aligned with the kind of work that many of her peers choose to do.” Another senior was a fanatic for rare books and rare objects and wrote a thesis on World War II treasures. She then went to work for a medical software company. This isn’t a pattern peculiar to Harvard. Anushka Shenoy, who graduated from Columbia in 2008, told me: “It didn’t occur to me to study anything other than economics and go into a banking or consulting career.” That’s what the people around her at Columbia aspired to and worked toward. That was the vogue. “I didn’t know anything about management consulting except that it was really hard to get into,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Okay! I’ll try that!’ ” She landed an enviable job at Bain & Company, and moved to San Francisco to work for that management consulting firm there. But after a few years, she realized that she had no passion for what she was doing and that, in retrospect, she’d never really paused at Columbia to take adequate survey of what her heartfelt interests were. Everything there moved too fast for that to happen. It was as if there was no space to wander, no license for it. Once she took a breath and thought more deeply about it all, she changed tacks—and how. Now twenty-eight, she’s in medical school in Portland at Oregon Health & Science University. And she’s much happier. What Shenoy felt at Columbia and what the authors of the funnel-effect paper noticed at Harvard are part of what the writer Junot Díaz refers to as “the commodification of the university as a trade guild, a very expensive trade guild.” I contacted Díaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” four years later, primarily because he’d gone to a state school, Rutgers, and has spoken of how well it served him and how much he loved it. But he has an additional vantage point on higher education and on today’s admissions mania, because he’s on the faculty of one of the most selective institutions in the country, MIT. He’s been teaching creative writing there for twelve years. “The idea that a university directly feeds into a job: This is sacred law now,” said Díaz, forty-six. “When I went to school, yeah, the university was going to help get you a job, but there was an entire experience around the university that was about your life and being educated in ways that weren’t about markets. Nowadays, most of my students have a very, very painful or excruciating or overbearing market prerogative on them. The idea that you would go to a university for an education at the level of your soul is considered absurd, and to me that’s heartbreaking.” He was speaking of higher education in general—he has taught at Syracuse University and New York University, too—and his observations dovetailed precisely with the results of an annual survey of incoming freshmen at hundreds of colleges nationwide. Administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, it shows a striking change in the stated priorities of students over the last half century. For example, in the mid-1960s, only 42 percent of freshmen said that being able to “make more money” was a “very important” goal in their decision to go to college. That number rose to just over 73 percent in the survey results published in March 2014. Between the mid-1970s and 2014, the percentage who said that getting a better job was a “very important” motivation to attend college rose from 67.8 percent to 86.3 percent. Over that same stretch of time, the percentage of students who attached considerable importance to developing a meaningful life philosophy fell sharply. But the particular culture that Díaz can best vouch for, the one in his mind when he mentions “most of my students,” is MIT’s. “I’ve literally had a front-row seat on this crap,” he said. “It’s just crazy.” An immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Díaz grew up among poor and working-class people who struggled and generally didn’t have college educations. “I was a kid stranded in a neighborhood next to the largest active landfill in New Jersey,” he said. “Rutgers gave me a passport to the world.” It introduced itself to him as the name and logo on a sweatshirt worn by a friend’s sister, who went there, and it became a symbol of hope for Díaz, a promise of something larger and better, a focus of his aspirations. “For us working-class kids, it seemed a gold mine,” he said. And it rejected him, at least the first time he applied. In high school he hadn’t gotten the grades he’d needed to, and so he spent a year at Kean College (now Kean University) in Union, New Jersey, proving to himself and to Rutgers that he could do better. He transferred to Rutgers for his sophomore year, majored in English and lived in a residence hall favored by students interested in writing. He also worked: pumping gas, washing dishes. And, more than any of that, he opened his eyes to a newly kaleidoscopic community. Communities, really. “I had never met feminists,” he said. “I had never met activists. I’d never met anyone who was openly gay and would organize around that identity. All of this stuff, I’d never had access to. My pre-Rutgers life was like black-and-white television. It was like the first few minutes of The Wizard of Oz before the color kicks in.” Is MIT that kind of rainbow? Are any of the elite schools? Not in Díaz’s experience. “If you look at the family backgrounds of my kids, you’re not getting a very diverse student body,” he said. “They can claim it’s diverse. But you’re not getting the kind of diversity that I had at Rutgers, where you had kids who were Ivy League–qualified but their parents didn’t want to spend that money, and kids like me, immigrants busting their humps. We have in so many ways narrowed it down.” Echoing Poch, he said that what he sees when he looks at many of the students at MIT and at the other revered university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are what he called “fragile thoroughbreds.” They’ve been trained to peak performance on tests and in term papers, but not to the unpredictability and tumult of adulthood. Many of them come to MIT for specific preparation for a career they’ve already decided on. They’re after a credential they’ve been told they need. They’re executing a plan they brought with them. And the university helps them with that, indulging who they are rather than challenging it, because elite colleges—maybe all colleges—are businesses in the end. “Customers come in and they want their pickles on their burger,” Díaz said. “They don’t come in for you to upend everything.” Maybe I got lucky, because my Princeton students didn’t seem as intellectually incurious as Deresiewicz found most of the kids at Yale. One was learning Farsi and plotting an ambitious, months-long summer backpacking trip along what used to be the Silk Road, and she wasn’t doing this with a big pile of money from her parents, who didn’t have it, or to impress the admissions committee, which she’d already done, or with a career in mind, because she hadn’t yet decided on one. She was just doing it. Another, though bound for Wall Street and scarily fluent in the ways of Princeton’s status-ratifying eating clubs, had read an array of fiction and nonfiction that only someone who’s following his heart and brain rather than any syllabus reads: cult mysteries, bestselling thrillers, books about food, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace. And another wrote a final paper of such detail, depth and polish that I almost got choked up as I graded it, or rather showered it with compliments. She’d already sewn up an A in the class and was pretty much on track for employment following her imminent graduation, but she had grown fascinated by the topic, was determined to become an expert on it, and seemed interested in doing excellent work for excellent work’s sake. The sixteen kids in my class didn’t seem all that fragile, either, though they were less accustomed to criticism than I expected students to be. Isn’t digesting negative feedback and turning it into positive fuel the very metabolism of education? Isn’t school supposed to humble you? That’s not how it played out at Princeton, which seemed more expressly designed to pump up and prop up its students. I hadn’t yet interviewed Díaz, and didn’t do so until the semester was long over, but the word customer frequently entered my own thoughts while I was teaching there. From the moment I arrived on campus to the moment I left, I got the message that the students were my clients, and I was told more often about what I owed them, in terms of unambiguous explanations, in terms of support, than about what they owed me, their professor. While I was instructed not to be lavish with A’s, I was also informed that virtually nobody got C’s. If a student seemed to be descending to a C-plus or even a B-minus, I should check in. I should intervene. Something might be wrong, and it was incumbent on me to look into what that was, whether it could be fixed, and if there was an aspect of the course or of my instruction that wasn’t quite working. I caught one student cheating, and when I raised the matter with other faculty, looking for advice, I was asked whether I’d spelled out the rules of the class and the specifics of the assignment with sufficient clarity. And I was encouraged to give the student a do-over. I liked most of the kids in my class immensely. They were warm and polite. Several had charm to burn. But more than a few of them operated with a literalism that I found dispiriting. They wanted to know exactly the minimum number of interviews necessary for a given assignment. They wanted to know exactly, point by point and step by step, what they could do to lift the B-plus they’d just received for one paper to an A-minus for the next. They seemed to be calibrating their efforts and meting out their exertions with pinpoint precision, focused on discrete markers instead of anything larger. I kept wishing for less cunning and more heart. In many ways I was in awe of Princeton. It’s a magnificent haven, gorgeous to look at, brimming with talent, rich with world-renowned faculty. But I was sometimes unsettled by many students’ tone-deafness to the good fortune embedded in all of that, to the stereotype of Ivy League kids as the cosseted denizens of an aloof caste. I learned that one of the eating clubs hosted an especially raucous, beer-soaked party known as “State Night,” the idea being that on this sloppy occasion, everyone would party as if at a state school. They were encouraged to wear Tshirts or sweatshirts with the names of such institutions—I’m sure that Díaz’s alma mater, Rutgers, made the occasional cameo—though some kids would come in garb from other, supposedly lesser rivals in the Ivy League, which, they would reportedly joke, might as well be public universities. Another eating club had “Titanic Night,” when partygoers were assigned to different classes of the ship—steerage, et cetera—and told to dress as they imagined those status-sorted seafarers would. But I was most struck by something I noticed in my own seminar, which was devoted to food writing. Before it began, more than 45 students signed up for the 16 slots. In situations like that, the university has them write letters of application to introduce themselves and describe their interest in the course; the professor then makes the cut. I read the letters, with a smile and with welling excitement. These kids were so mature, articulate, enthusiastic. Then, deep into the semester, I realized that more than half of my sixteen students hadn’t written anything for the class that showed the verve and care of their letters. I mentioned this to several full-time professors at Princeton. All nodded, unsurprised. They explained that what many Princeton students excelled at, as demonstrated by the fact that they were there, at a school with an acceptance rate that’s now about 7 percent, was getting into things, and that the message these kids had received from the college admissions mania was that gaining access, besting the competition, was the principal goal and primary accomplishment. You rallied your best self, or struck your comeliest pose, for that. You didn’t worry as much about what came after. Those same full-time professors theorized that Wall Street was such a common destination for Princeton’s graduating seniors precisely because the process of getting the most desirable jobs there was a competition among peers that was familiar from the college admissions sweepstakes. It gave their college years a rhythm, shape and purpose that they recognized, pointing them toward another culling, and promising, if all went well, the satisfaction of having acquired something that many classmates didn’t. One Princeton student, not in my seminar, and not willing to be identified, told me that his lack of interest in any future as a financier left him feeling lost, because he’d never stopped, on his path to Princeton, to figure out what he expected to get out of the university. He just knew that he was supposed to fight for admission to it. After he arrived on campus, he said, he experienced a palpable letdown, a loss of velocity. “A lot of my friends have experienced similar things,” he said. “In high school, getting to college was what everyone’s doing. That’s what everyone is focused on. And then once you get to college, it becomes ambiguous. I kind of felt like I put so much energy getting in in the first place that once I got in, I didn’t know what to do.” “What’s that last line in The Candidate?” asked Bruce Poch, referring to the political classic, starring Robert Redford, about the triumph of process over substance, image over truth. At the very end of the movie, Redford’s character wins his election but seems lost, and asks his equally victory-focused team what happens next. “The whole thing was getting it, getting it, whoring himself in ways that are just stunning, and then they find that they don’t know what to do,” Poch remembered. He said that there’s an element of that in the kids who wind up at elite colleges. I put this observation to Anthony Marx, the former Amherst president, who fell silent for about fifteen seconds. I couldn’t tell if he was mulling whether he agreed with it or just trying to choose his words with diplomatic care. Finally he spoke: “It’s interesting to think about how this is shaping America. If our elite is to some extent being formed by this powerful experience of frenzied admissions, does it suggest that we’re creating a culture in which the sale is more important than the product?” That’s just one of the frenzy’s many troubling implications. The kids who strap themselves into it get the signal, or convince themselves, that they must assemble their high school records in a particular way—this many AP courses, that many extracurricular activities, a memorable summer job, an area of study to which they show profound attachment—whether it tracks with their real interests or not, whether it’s who they are or some contrived mannequin. A contrived mannequin is okay. “We’ve spent so much time talking about packaging that it suggests that the real trick of the collegiate endeavor is to be packaged,” said Andre Phillips, the senior associate director of recruitment and outreach at the main campus of the University of Wisconsin. There’s too little emphasis on authenticity, which has too unreliable a reward. And there’s so much talk of the trickery that applicants employ, of the connections they exploit and of favoritism and gullibility in admissions offices that too many kids feel licensed, even compelled, to do whatever it takes: hired guns, massaged credentials, outright lies. “The message a kid hears is: I can’t do it on my own, I’m not worth enough,” said Lloyd Thacker, the executive director of the Education Conservancy, a nonprofit devoted to changing and restoring calm to the admissions process. “There’s real evidence of the deleterious effect—the cumulative impact—of this process,” he said, alluding to scattered cheating scandals around the country, both among kids taking the SATs to get into college and kids already there. He recalled that a few years ago, “I’m giving a talk at a school in Bellevue, Washington: Bill Gates territory. I talk about bad behavior in gaming the system, and the audience is really quiet. Then the counselor tells me that two weeks earlier, kids were caught breaking into the principal’s office to change their AP scores. And a mother then asked a counselor at the school, ‘You’re not going to change the recommendation you wrote for Johnny because of this, are you?’” From him and others I kept hearing the same apprehension: If you hold up certain metrics as the very determinants of children’s futures, if you invest those metrics with too much importance and allow too blinding a focus on them, don’t you essentially instruct kids to define and see themselves in terms of those very measurements? Isn’t it unconstructively clinical, and doesn’t it turn them inward on themselves rather than outward toward the world? “The kids in my grade—the ‘smart’ ones—grade their success purely on a points system,” Jess Silverman, a seventeen-year-old senior at a New Jersey high school, marveled to me. “They measure everything down to the decimal, charting their happiness based on a test curve. It’s given me an ideal to strive against. It scares me to become so dependent on a number, because that’s not what I am.” But, she added, it’s what the culture around her seems to want her to be. I worry just as much about the pecking order that the admissions process creates, or at least affirms. That order is so entrenched and pervasive that even Deresiewicz, who is clearly and rightly disapproving of it, falls prey to its vocabulary in a passage that I quoted above, referring to “prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools.” The italics are mine, used to point out that even within the stratum of selectivity, there are yet more tiers, yet finer gradations. From these microcategories kids develop lists of “reach schools” and “safety schools,” of fantasies and fallbacks. They stretch hopefully for some. They settle dejectedly for others. And they are acutely aware of where they end up. This came through in a letter published in response to a column in the Times in 2012 by Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University and the author of the book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Delbanco had written that there was “a germ of truth” to the charge that elite colleges bred self-satisfaction, and he expressed the wish that they “encouraged more humility and less hubris.” “A germ?” asked the author of the letter. “Has he ever been to a sports event where one team is an Ivy League school and its entire student section engages in the chant ‘Safety school! Saaaaa-fety school!’ at the opponents?” Caste consciousness also popped up in a conversation I had with Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell. Segal was reflecting on the way that people in general and today’s kids in particular can lose sight of how fortunate they really are, always glancing around them and spotting someone with a seemingly better lot. He was also remarking on the unnecessary distinctions made in contemporary America. And he told me that because he’s fascinated by those habits and curious about them, he routinely puts a particular question to the two-hundred-odd students in his largest lecture class. He asks how many of them feel bad that they didn’t get into Harvard or Yale. “Lots of hands go up,” he told me. “Probably sixty percent of the class. And the ones that don’t? I’m not convinced that they don’t want to go up.” This is a lecture with seniors, juniors, sophomores. They’re years past the college admissions process. They’re in the Ivy League. And they’re still thinking of what might have been, and still mulling their exact place in the nonsensical college hierarchy that our society has constructed. Nine Humbled, Hungry and Flourishing “Whenever I do graduation speeches, I always tell students; Yes, yes, often the name of your university can open doors for you. But in the end, it is so up to you. I know that’s a cliché. But I think that sometimes the very, very fortunate people who’ve gone to the Ivy League or Cambridge or Oxford are a little entitled, and I don’t think entitlement is good for a career.” —Christiane Amanpour, CNN anchor and 1983 graduate of the University of Rhode Island Justin de Benedictis-Kessner won’t lie. He did not arrive at the College of William and Mary in the fall of 2007 thinking, “This is really for the best.” He did not arrive with the belief that everything happens for a reason or with any other, similarly sunny platitude in mind. He arrived skeptically, even bitterly, still aware, he said, that “this is my safety school,” and still smarting over his inability to go elsewhere. Although William and Mary is routinely ranked among the top 50 national universities by U.S. News, it wasn’t what prep school graduates like him aspired to; only two students from his class at Exeter would be joining him there, many fewer than were heading to any given Ivy League school. “I arrived on campus a naive and preemptively arrogant freshman, ready to excel in classes and to get the whole college thing done with,” he said. And he feels embarrassed about that now. Raised in Berkeley, California, he went to Exeter because his father had gone there many years before and because he was given a scholarship that covered all of his expenses, which his parents weren’t in a position to afford. When junior year dawned, the talk about college spiked. “They’ve got the process down to a science there,” he said, explaining that there were perhaps eight full-time college counselors and that each student was assigned to a specific one, who would provide advice about “how to structure your classes, what classes you might want to take, whether you should focus on grades or leadership activities.” And as he and his classmates began to obsess about admissions, people outside the school assured him that he’d fare brilliantly. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you go to Exeter? You’ll get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton, because it’s a feeder school,’” Justin recalled. “And my dad echoed that.” He didn’t apply to those three schools, but he did apply to Dartmouth, Middlebury, Tufts, Swarthmore. “I was really, really into Swarthmore,” he said. “And then, as a backup, I applied to Kenyon, William and Mary and some California state schools.” After he got his acceptances and rejections, he was left to choose among UCLA, UCSD, UC Davis, Tufts, George Washington University, Kenyon and William and Mary. Of those schools Tufts excited him the most by far. It was in the Northeast, where the lion’s share of his friends would be attending college, and it was somewhere Exeter kids routinely went. But neither it nor GWU nor Kenyon was offering him as much financial aid as William and Mary was, and, he said, “My parents were adamant that I not take on a lot of debt for college. “I took the train down to Tufts, because I was dead set on it,” he recalled. “I thought I wanted to study developmental psychology and do this particular program there. I visited the financial aid office. They laid out the books: Here’s your family’s situation, here’s why we can’t give you more money. I’m pretty sure I was in a chair crying. I was as close to begging as you can get without being on the floor.” So William and Mary it was. And while regret trailed him there, he was smart and practical enough to try to convert it into a kind of gameness. “That sense of disappointment motivated me,” he said, and he set about making William and Mary its own adventure—not the one he’d wanted, not the one he’d planned, but a worthwhile side trip, a diversion that surely had virtues all its own. Because William and Mary was a relatively small school and he didn’t feel intimidated by it, he signed up for stuff. He joined groups—the rowing team, for example. He’d been, in his own estimation, “a mediocre rower” at Exeter, so he hadn’t resolved to continue the sport in college. But William and Mary’s team was modest and approachable. “I had the chance to be in some of the varsity boats as a freshman and to excel in a sport that I loved,” he said. “That was awesome, and it couldn’t have happened at some of those other schools. I ended up being the president of the rowing team by the time I left. I even raised a bunch of money for the school, helped to build the boathouse.” On William and Mary’s stage, he became a star, a leader. “I ran for the student honor council,” he said, and he was elected, so he spent several years adjudicating ethics violations like plagiarism cases. It fascinated him. “I learned a lot about how people’s minds work,” he said. And in his government and psychology classes—he was a double major—he found that he stood out and that professors noticed and appreciated him, extending opportunities his way. During his freshman year, a psychology professor invited him to help with a research project over the summer, and he eagerly agreed to. Another professor later put him on another research project, actually hired him for it, paid him and then wrote him a glowing recommendation for grad school. “He’s the reason I’m here,” Justin said, referring to MIT, where he’s pursuing a doctorate in political science and working as a research coordinator in the political experiments lab. His dissertation examines how public services and government accountability at the local level influence and interact with people’s political opinions, and he said that it could logically lead to a job in academia or in the private sector, doing data analysis. He hasn’t decided which he wants. But he’s sure that he’s on the right page. And he’s grateful for his years at William and Mary, where he had not only a great time but also a meaningful one that pointed him as sharply as he could be pointed in an academic and professional direction that feels exactly right. Justin doesn’t wonder what Swarthmore might have meant to him or what Tufts might have done for him. He doesn’t feel so much as a twinge of regret. “There was a lot more that I could do in a new environment than I could have done if I’d gone to a college with a huge bunch of people I’d been to high school with,” he explained. William and Mary, he said, was nothing less than “a chance to reinvent myself.” It’s impossible, and therefore foolish, to say definitively that some students are better served by going to colleges that aren’t their first or third or fifth choices; that aren’t quite as prestigious as the ones that they had hoped for or actually decided to pass up; or that aren’t on anyone’s list of elite standouts. And the students themselves are perhaps the worst judges of the situation. After all, it’s a human tendency, and a merciful one at that, to develop and hold tight to a conviction that the assigned or chosen course turned out to be the optimal one, especially if the alternatives are no longer in play. Regret is corrosive; many people surrender it as quickly as possible. And if they can’t be with the one they thought they would love, well, they love the one they’re with. But some of these students, like Justin, really do develop an assurance that might have been suffocated on a campus of kids with a more uniform academic fluency and more obvious self-possession. They sidestep the peril, explored by Malcolm Gladwell in a passage of his book David and Goliath, that threw one Brown University student he profiled off her longtime desire to be a scientist. “She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country,” Gladwell wrote, “and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn’t stupid at all.” In a less daunting body of water, she might have escaped the currents of self-doubt. And some students at smaller, more obscure colleges discover that what these schools lack in a bounty of resources they often make up for in the availability of the resources that do exist. This was the experience that Todd Martinez had at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I briefly mentioned Martinez, forty-seven, a Stanford chemistry professor and (like Díaz) a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner, earlier in the book, in connection with his belief that there’s not likely to be all that much difference between the prowess of students at a school with a 5 percent acceptance rate, like Stanford’s, and students at a school with a 20 percent acceptance rate. He went to Calvin College largely because it’s run by the Christian Reformed Church, for which his father was a missionary. It has about four thousand students and an acceptance rate now of just under 70 percent. He then did his graduate work at UCLA and taught at the University of Illinois as well as at Stanford, so he has seen the world of higher education through disparate lenses. And he told me that at many small schools like Calvin, “you have much more access much earlier to both equipment and to professors.” He gave the example of a nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, machine. “Most schools that have a chemistry program will have an NMR machine. But at UCLA, where I was a grad student, the undergraduates are not going to touch it, whereas we at Calvin were able to take apart the NMR machine if we wanted.” It wasn’t the fastest, most powerful, most sophisticated kind of NMR machine, he said. But it was theirs. They could have at it. Similarly, he said, professors were approachable in a way that they sometimes aren’t at larger schools. The novelist John Green, who wrote the bestselling phenomenon The Fault in Our Stars, certainly found that to be true when he was a student in the late 1990s at Kenyon, in Gambier, Ohio. It has about 1,700 students, and Green told me that he got to know many professors there extremely well. An exchange with one of them stays with him always. It had no small bearing on his ability to forge a career as a writer after he graduated, he said. At Kenyon, Green took an introductory fiction-writing class, after which he applied to take another, more advanced one. It was open to only twelve students. A total of sixteen, including him, wanted in, and he was one of the four turned away. “I was decimated,” he said. “I thought, ‘If you can’t be one of the best twelve writers in your class at your tiny Midwestern college, how are you ever going to have a career?’” Fred Kluge, the professor who taught the class that Green had completed but not the follow-up, took note of his reaction. “Without me even saying anything to him, he invited me to his house,” Green recalled. “He sat me down. He poured himself a glass of Scotch. He poured me a glass of seltzer water. And he told me I was a good writer, ‘a solid B-plus writer,’ as he put it, and then he told me that the stories I told before class and on breaks were really, really good, and if I could figure out a way to write the way I told those stories, I could have a life in writing.” Green’s problem, Kluge suggested, was that he was trying too hard to be lofty and literary; he wasn’t writing from emotion, in a true voice. The advice was precise, and it was pivotal. “I needed someone to tell me that I had potential, but I also needed someone to tell me why I didn’t get into that class,” Green said, adding that Kluge’s intervention “was way above and beyond the call of duty.” Green holds on to, and sometimes revisits, a particular photograph from his graduation ceremony at Kenyon, and the reason isn’t the way he looks in it but the fact that Kluge can be seen in the background, watching over him and smiling. Green, who is now thirty-seven, said that before Kenyon, he wasn’t an especially good student, and had perhaps a 2.9 GPA at the prestigious boarding school he attended in Birmingham, Alabama. His SAT scores were “reasonable,” he said; he did better, oddly, in the math than in the verbal component. Many of his classmates applied to Ivy League schools. He didn’t dare. As he remembers it, his applications went to Emory University, Grinnell College, Kenyon, Macalester College and Guilford College, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He was put on the wait list at Emory, rejected at Macalester and got into the rest. Back then, he said, Kenyon took more than 50 percent of its applicants. These days it takes between 35 and 40 percent. “It isn’t any better or worse a college,” he laughed. “It’s mostly the same teachers as when I went.” And he thought it was terrific. He loved it. He did a double major in English and religion, and he said that most of his classes had between eight and thirty students. One had four. It was called “Reading Ulysses,” he said, and it was devoted entirely to James Joyce’s masterpiece. One of the other three students was Ransom Riggs, who went on to write the bestseller Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. “Looking back on it, I got such tremendous value out of the classes,” Green said, and he recalled many of them with a detail that made clear just how much they’d meant to him. He talked about a class on Islamic history. He also talked about a class on Jesus in which he learned that “the idea that there were sons of gods wasn’t in any way uncommon in the first century,” he said. “That wasn’t the radical idea. The radical idea was that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God. And that just blew my mind.” He relished his excursions into nineteenth-century British romantic literature. “There’s just so much stuff in those classes that I use in my books,” he said. “I’m always cheating and stealing from them. I wish that I could go to college again, so that I could have four more years to steal and cheat from. “There’s something magical about that time,” he continued, and it’s not primarily that you’re living among all your friends or going to so many parties. It’s not the beauty of a campus or the first taste of something verging on adult independence. It’s the permission to sit still, to think. It’s the lull, the space and the freedom for that. “Spending six hours on a Sunday reading Jane Eyre and Jane Eyre criticism is by far the best use of your time,” he said. He wishes he’d done more of that. And while he could have done it at any number of schools, he said that he’s not sure that many of them would have served him nearly as well as Kenyon did. And that’s not because Kenyon is famous as a cradle for writers, the school that gave birth to the Kenyon Review, which is still published in Gambier. It’s because of Kenyon’s personal touch, its intimacy. One of his religion professors, Don Rogan, would invite him over for evenings when various professors recited poetry. And he became a coach and an audience for Green when Green found his way back to fiction writing. Green said that after the rejection from the advanced class, “I stopped for about a year and felt totally useless, but started up again my senior year and wrote a story that—while still very bad—was a huge leap forward for me. It was about a recently ordained Lutheran minister traveling home to perform a wedding who ends up also overseeing a funeral, and it was longer than anything I’d ever written and I remember it as brilliant, but then of course I dredged up a copy and it turns out to be pretty awful. These things should live in memory, where they can glister. “Anyway,” Green continued, “Don treated the story with total respect and encouraged me to finish it, and I still remember his comments about it after I gave it to him upon my graduation. He said, ‘This is a very promising story. The funeral went on too long, but then, funerals generally do.’” Reflecting on Rogan, reflecting on Kluge, Green said, “I do think that those relationships were more available to me than if I’d gone to Harvard. “My closest friend in high school went to Princeton,” he said. “A couple of months after he started, he sent me an email: ‘There are a lot of stupid people here.’ He got 1600 on the SATs and was searingly brilliant. He was really offended that all of these people didn’t live up to his expectations.” Green wasn’t making a dig at Princeton. He was making the point that the experience a person has at any school depends on hopes, prejudices, unforeseeable interactions, attitude. It’s subjective. “I believe that you can get a good education at most American universities,” Green said. “You can also get a not-good education anywhere. You can scrape by.” That’s what he sees when he looks at the people and the world around him. “I might be wrong about this,” he said, “but I don’t think it matters that much where you go.” I’m inclined to agree, but then I recognize just how right Kenyon was for him and William and Mary for Justin. I consider how many kids seem to find, at schools well outside the Ivy League, a reassurance, an impetus or a spark that they might not have found at schools inside of it. Those schools do seem to matter. They do seem to make a difference. Just as Harvard is the crucial launch for one person, the University of Maryland or the University of Rochester can be essential for another. I cite Maryland for a reason. I interviewed one young lawyer who went there, but only after rejections from Columbia and UPenn that were such a “personal blow to my identity,” he said, that he posted them on the wall above his bed in his boarding school dormitory room, “to remind myself to do better.” At Maryland he was a standout in the criminal justice department, because he resolved to be and because he could be. As a result, he got into the highly regarded law school at New York University. Upon his graduation from it last year, he nabbed a coveted associate’s position with a major Manhattan firm. And I cite Rochester because that’s Joseph Ross’s alma mater. Ross, now forty, attended high school in the suburbs of Buffalo, and he said that his best friends in his graduating class headed alternately to Harvard, Yale, Amherst, UPenn and Smith. “I was the dumb one among them,” he said. “I applied to UPenn and Cornell. Didn’t get into either.” So he went to Rochester, where he didn’t feel at all like the dumb one. “My high school had been very competitive,” he said, “and I did much better in college.” He developed an assertiveness, academically speaking, that he hadn’t possessed before, and he stretched further than he might otherwise have, attempting and completing not only two majors, in psychology and neuroscience, but also a minor in creative writing. When he turned his gaze toward becoming a physician, he didn’t bother with the top-ranked medical schools. After all, Rochester had wholly satisfied him, and it didn’t sit at the summit of rankings. As best he can recall, he applied to just two places, SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Syracuse, both of which made sense in terms of cost. He ended up at SUNY Buffalo, and eventually made his way to where he is now: on the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine. He teaches internal medicine there and also writes frequently and extensively for various blogs and publications, a passion that has been helped enormously by classes he took at Rochester. At an unusually young age, he’s an associate editor for JAMA Internal Medicine. “I can’t imagine a better job,” he told me. As for the way he got there, he said, “I think that what served me well, and this is part of what I look for when I’m selecting research fellows, was focusing on what I was passionate about rather than focusing on getting into School X.” Perhaps partly because of Rochester, Ross concentrated on deeds, not labels. And perhaps partly because of Northwestern Oklahoma State University, Travis F. Jackson, who is also forty, concentrated on working harder than many of the people around him. Jackson is a Los Angeles–based lawyer with a nationwide firm that’s a major player in the health-care industry. His career has gone about as well as he could have imagined, and it has taken him far from the Oklahoma farmland where he grew up. “My town had a population of about one thousand,” he told me, “though I think there may have been some cattle in that count.” He went to college at Northwestern Oklahoma State because it was nearby and affordable. He graduated summa cum laude. He went to law school at the University of Notre Dame because he got a scholarship that paid for enough of his expenses to keep his student loan debt manageable. He graduated summa cum laude there, too. At Notre Dame he was around many alumni of elite colleges, and he’s been around many more of them since. And he said that because his own undergraduate alma mater doesn’t have any particular glimmer, “I was intimidated to compete with these people. But that made me not take things for granted. “With all due respect to some of my friends who have gone to Ivy League schools,” he said, “I think they have a tendency to do that.” They’re not as intent on proving themselves, because in their own minds, their diploma has already made their case for them. And consciously or unconsciously, they count on it to be a safety net. “If I didn’t put the effort in,” Jackson said, “I didn’t have anything to fall back on.” Indeed, students at less lavishly celebrated colleges are sometimes motivated by their institutions’ lack of luster. They don’t assume that the names of their schools will propel them into the job market and through life, so they take greater care to acquit themselves in a way that might. Nor do they assume that the college atmosphere they inhabit is so rich with positive influences that they’ll simply prosper by osmosis. They’re prodded to be scrappier, and that can turn into its own advantage. “You’re going to be forced to be more entrepreneurial at a small school,” said Martinez, reflecting on his experience at Calvin. He developed an interest in theoretical chemistry early on there, and the college couldn’t offer him every last bit of instruction he craved. But it had a library and affiliations and concerned, generous faculty. He discovered that he could improvise and patch together what he needed. Looking back, he sees enormous merit in having been compelled to take that kind of initiative. “It’s not necessary to get into a highly selective school in order to be successful,” he said. “What’s necessary is to understand what you want to do and how to do it well, and to be a self-starter.” As I listened to Jackson, Ross and others whom I interviewed, I searched for any and all commonalities, themes, ways of thinking and strategies for behaving that departed from a lockstep striving for the school with the “best” name. And I spotted, in the stories of many of the people happiest with the way things had turned out for them, an openness to serendipity that sometimes gets edited out of the equation when you’re blindly accepting the marks that your parents and your peers have all agreed on and you’re dutifully hitting them, one after the other. I noticed a nimbleness in adapting to change, a willingness to shoot off in a new direction and an attention to the particular virtues of the landscape right around them rather than an obsession with the promised glories of the imagined terrain around the bend. I saw qualities that Hiram Chodosh, the Claremont McKenna president, told me were in woefully short supply these days. He remarked on, and rued, a “propensity to be very linear” in too many of today’s overachievers. He conceded that this wasn’t a wholly new phenomenon, remembering his time at Yale Law School and the way many of his peers there drew up and executed their plans to become law professors down the line. Their thinking, he said, went like this: “I need to get a great federal court clerkship, ideally with the Supreme Court. To get that, I need to have a recommendation from a prominent Yale law professor. To get that, I need to TA for him my third year. To do that, I need to work for the law review under their supervision my second year.” As Chodosh flashed back on that, he shook his head. “You don’t become a great academic because you’re trying to become a great academic,” he said. “You become a great academic when you look out the window and you have something to say about what’s wrong with this picture that’s unique.” Not enough of the students arriving at elite schools are looking out the window. Instead, he said, “There’s this job they want, and they’ve benchmarked someone’s career, and they’ve created a straight-line path. Frankly, I don’t know people who’ve been successful who’ve worked in a straight line. Maybe they exist, but I don’t know them.” I know some, but their straight lines usually didn’t begin all the way back in kindergarten or for that matter middle or high school, and their mile markers weren’t SAT scores and enrollment at a college with an acceptance rate below 15 percent. Their focus was the actual work they intended to do: preparing themselves for it, picking up the skills they needed, snatching small chances to show what they were capable of and then using those to grab hold of even bigger chances. That’s how success generally happens. It’s how it happened for Christiane Amanpour, the CNN correspondent who occupies an altitude in the news business so lofty that when the writer Sheila Weller chose three TV journalists to profile in her 2014 book, The News Sorority, she grouped Amanpour with Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer. I’d met Amanpour a few times and knew her a bit before I thought to inquire about where she’d gone to school. I can be as pitiful a slave to stereotypes as anyone else, and the erudition that she exhibits on air, coupled with her plummy English accent, led me to expect Oxford or Cambridge. The University of Rhode Island surprised me. Amanpour grew up in privileged circumstances in Iran and indeed attended boarding school in England. “My original desire to be a doctor didn’t pan out,” she told me. “I didn’t get the right grades. I was a bit lost and roaming in the academic wilderness. And I didn’t go to school again after high school for a number of years.” The revolution in Iran sharpened her interest in international affairs and gave her the idea of becoming a journalist, but it also wiped out her parents’ funds and put many colleges out of financial reach. She knew she wanted to study in America—it was where so many friends had fled—and was steered to the University of Rhode Island because it didn’t cost as much as many private colleges and because a family friend knew the school’s president. The reasons were that mundane and the process that quick and blunt. Like Dick Parsons, Condoleezza Rice, Howard Schultz and so many others, she pivoted to college in a manner that bore positively no relation to what so many kids and parents today put themselves through. Partly because Amanpour didn’t start college until she was twenty-one and partly because money was a concern, she did a swift sprint toward her diploma, beginning school in January 1980 and finishing, after six semesters, in December 1982. She worked during that time, at a local television station in Providence, about a forty-minute drive from the school’s location in Kingston, Rhode Island. And, she said, “I did not live on campus. I lived with friends in Providence, who, actually, hilariously, were at Brown, so I got the best of both worlds.” (For one period, one of those housemates was a Brown student by the name of John F. Kennedy Jr.) She said that the education that she got in her journalism classes was helpful, but her time off-campus was at least as important, and what mattered most of all was that she had figured out what she wanted—a journalism career—and she summoned a drive to match that direction. Perhaps it had to do with the upset of the Iranian Revolution and with being so far from home. “My life experience made me much more worldly than most of the freshmen, sophomores and juniors I encountered,” she said, adding that her subsequent success “was a combination of the education I got and a deep, deep commitment and understanding that I had to work hard in the world. It was my own personal motivation. I climbed the ladder very systematically and dogmatically—internships, ground level at CNN, up the ladder. At no point did the name of my college make any difference in my career.” My friend Scott Pask could—and would—say the same about the name of his college, and with him, as with Amanpour, I didn’t know for the longest time which college that was. I was aware that he’d received a master’s in fine art at Yale University and that he’d done so when he was around thirty, and not right after his undergraduate education. But where that undergraduate education happened didn’t come up in our conversations until several years into our friendship, which goes back about a decade now. Pask went to the University of Arizona. He’s a prodigiously respected Broadway set designer, with three Tony Awards to his credit, along with a slew of additional nominations. And he’s exactly the kind of person Hiram Chodosh envisions when he sings the virtues of not working in a straight line. Scott grew up in Yuma, Arizona, without much money, so cost was a major consideration when he decided on college. He chose the University of Arizona. He wanted to study architecture—“I loved drawing houses,” he said, “and I loved looking at houses”—and according to his research, Arizona was a fine place to do that. He enrolled in its College of Architecture, which he said was “a very small and rigorous institution within the greater structure of the university.” And he quickly came to know the other students and the professors in the college well. The conversation among them was constant, enlightened, intense. He reveled in that. Even so, he didn’t tamp down interests other than architecture when they flared. Didn’t tame or limit his curiosity. Occasionally, Broadway musicals would come to town, and he found himself drawn to them. Watching the spectacle of Cats, he wondered who conceived and built the sets and how the whole process worked. “I thought it was some elaborate hobby that people had,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine that these were jobs: the design and the costumes and lighting. I thought, ‘Wow, how do they have the time to do that?’” They were surely doing something else, something real, to pay the bills. Although the theater program at Arizona was mostly limited to students who had chosen it as a major, Pask was determined to sign up for a set design class that he’d learned about. “It had all these prerequisites, none of which I had,” he said. “But I took over some models I’d been building, and they let me in.” After that he persuaded someone to let him help with a campus production. “It was like a light going on,” he said. He went ahead and got his architecture degree, but there were new thoughts bubbling in his head, new schemes being entertained. He set out for New York City without any detailed agenda. His first steady job was in a Paul Smith clothing store on Fifth Avenue. He usually manned the counter, though sometimes he folded shirts. “I was an ace folder,” he said. “I was also really good at accessories.” One year, he was even allowed to decorate the Christmas windows. He assiduously cultivated friendships with the artists and performers he met, and he seized opportunities for obscure, offbeat collaborations with them. He volunteered to create huge murals for regular parties at a New York nightclub. He contributed the scenery for the modest shows of aspiring dancers. And when he started to get paying jobs in set design, he threw himself into them, not principally out of ambition but because he loved what he was doing. It wasn’t until he was nearing thirty that he realized he had the makings of a lifelong career and enrolled at Yale, eager to expand his knowledge and raise his game. He now runs his business—and it’s a serious, successful business—out of a studio in Manhattan, and college students and recent graduates routinely ask to stop by. He says yes as often as he can. And he’s frustrated by how many of them are looking not for general advice or inspiration but for step-by-step marching orders. They want it all laid out for them. “There is no map!” he told me, his voice rising, his words emphatic. And if someone insisted on drawing one, with a destination of his brilliant career, they probably wouldn’t put Arizona and a Paul Smith store on it. Ten Fire Over Formula “If you are extremely smart but you’re only partially engaged, you will be outperformed, and you should be, by people who are sufficiently smart but fully engaged.” —Britt Harris, the former chief executive of the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and a 1980 graduate of Texas A&M College has long been seen as a pivotal gateway—even the pivotal gateway—to professional success and overall fulfillment. Parents have long had strong feelings about where their kids should go. Kids have long felt enormous pride about where they were welcomed. And a hierarchy of colleges, with some eliciting more admiration than others, isn’t anything new. So what explains the particular fever of the college admissions process over the last decade? Why has the temperature risen so high? When I sat down with Anthony Marx, the former Amherst president, and asked him what he thought was driving the admissions mania, he first brought up something that was also very much on my mind: the heightened consciousness in America with status and labels and the thoroughness with which higher education has been absorbed into that. “People don’t advertise their names, their hometowns or their high schools,” he said. “What do people put on the back windshields of their cars? Colleges. Surely that says something about the branding aspect of higher education. Yes, we hope for our kids to get great educations and meet friends who will change their lives. And they do. But there is also the halo effect.” That can’t be all or even most of it, though: The stickers have been around for decades. A factor that hasn’t is the cult of the expert. Twenty years ago, you never heard about personal trainers; people believed in the possibility of squatting, sweating and slimming on their own. But trainers are now ubiquitous in the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of major metropolitan areas, whose most pampered, indulgent denizens may also have nutritionists and therapists and personal shoppers, in a few cases for their children as well as themselves. Many people of means seem to believe that there’s no problem, from a belly’s sprawl to a child’s sloth, that isn’t best fixed by throwing money and a specialist at it. Anything can be delegated. Everything can be outsourced. This mindset is the fertile climate for all of those independent college consultants, whose proliferation has invariably turned up the heat of the admissions process, both for the families who use them and the families who are then forced to worry about a possible penalty for not doing so. The cost of college aggravates the situation. Parents poised to spend as much as sixty thousand dollars a year on tuition, room and board want whatever’s deemed to be the luxury model and push their kids to attain it, while the children of the much greater number of parents who can’t swing a bill that enormous vie for scholarships whose acquisition and generosity hinge on board scores and GPAs higher than those of their peers. Several college placement counselors told me that the oft-rued narcissism of the so-called selfie generation may sometimes come into play, with kids intent on going to a revered institution that validates their self-regard. It’s where they belong. It’s what they deserve. On top of that, social media has given kids ways to keep track of one another and to issue widely seen bulletins about their lives that didn’t exist before, and what kids often want and choose to do with those bulletins, whether the news is related to college or something else, is impress. Check out the Facebook pages of high school seniors around the days that early-admission or general-admission notices are released, and you’ll see a blizzard of updates communicating who got in where. The process, like so much of modern life, is public as never before. But counselors said that mothers and fathers are the principal agents of the frenzy, which is the apotheosis of their efforts to micromanage every last moment of their children’s lives and protect them from all injury, especially to their self-esteem. If they’ve been run-of-the-mill helicopter parents up until they start plotting college, they become Black Hawks at that point. “Parents have put so much into kids, kids have put so much work in,” said Tim Levin, the head of the tutoring service Bespoke Education. “You get to this process that you don’t have a lot of control over—maybe for the first time in your life—and it’s so quirky that even if you do everything right, you may not get what you want. And that drives parents crazy. They’ve chosen the right schools, the right tutors, the right museums. They’ve controlled all the variables. And suddenly they get to something that they can’t control so well, and they can flip out a bit.” Especially because many of them sense that this passage in American life isn’t like others. That’s a key part of all of this, maybe the key part of all of this. The world is a more competitive place, in which the hegemony and influence of the United States are no longer the givens that they were in the past. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened, raising the stakes of which side of the divide you wind up on. “The difference between being in the top one or five or ten percent and not is bigger than ever before, so if people think going to a highly selective school will get you there, they’re going to care more,” said Alan Krueger, the Princeton economics professor. Like Krueger, Catharine Bond Hill, the Vassar president, is an economist, and like him she sees “increasing income inequality” behind the college admissions mania. “The reward for getting into the top X percent of the income distribution now is a multiple of what it was thirty or forty years ago, and people perceive the access to that as coming through these elite schools.” There are fewer and fewer well-paying jobs for people without college degrees and, over recent years, there hasn’t been any surfeit of great options for people with college degrees. The fear and awareness of this among young people were captured in a short graphic and story that ran in the summer of 2014 on Mic.com, a news and commentary website aimed at an audience of those under thirty years old. It showed that from 2000 to 2010, the number of people between 18 and 24 who were enrolled in college climbed by 29 percent; during the same period, the number of college-educated janitors rose by 69 percent. The post framed this, melodramatically, as possibly “the saddest economic statistic ever.” For most of the last decade, the gross domestic product has grown at a snail’s pace, and the optimism that once seemed inextricable from the American spirit has flatlined. In this century, there have been only three fleeting points when most Americans signaled satisfaction with the direction in which the country was headed, and all came at tense, fraught junctures when Americans had reasons to will themselves into a sort of defensive confidence: the month when George W. Bush took office, which followed the furious legal contest over vote counting in Florida and the intervention of the Supreme Court; the days following the 9/11 terrorists attacks; and the month when the United States invaded Iraq. All of those came in the first four years of the century. Over the next ten years, which the Democratic political strategist Doug Sosnik has referred to as “a decade of anger and dissatisfaction,” polling by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News continuously showed that the number of Americans who believed the country was on the wrong track exceeded those who thought that it was on the right track. “For the first time in our country’s history,” Sosnik wrote in a political memo that he shared with the newspaper and website Politico in late 2013, “there is more social mobility in Europe than in the United States.” Americans had been so humbled, and become so pessimistic, that when a Gallup poll asked them in mid-2014 which country was the world’s “leading economic power,” 52 percent said China, while only 31 percent gave the correct response: the United States. It was the sixth consecutive year in which more Americans had mistakenly answered China instead of our own country. And that downbeat, doubting frame of mind came through in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in August 2014, when 76 percent of Americans ages eighteen and older said they weren’t confident that their children’s generation would fare better than their own. That same survey showed that the percentage of Americans who felt that the United States was on the wrong track had shot up to 71. “It’s been a long time since Americans felt that way or at least had that aggregate fear,” said Anthony Marx. “So, understandably, you look for every angle that you can that will give your kid an advantage.” And a selective college that commands pronounced respect is perceived as one of those angles. In the eyes of apprehensive parents, it’s a possible guarantor, or at least an extra arrow in the quiver. So they meddle and wheedle and marshal whatever resources they have toward the goal of a college that gleams in the public eye, convinced that this is the responsible, caring thing to do. Or at least too many of them do this, setting their children up for what is very likely to be disappointment, infusing the effort with an emotionalism that can turn that disappointment into heartbreak and planting the notion that there’s a clear winner’s circle and, outside of it, a tundra of uncertainty. “It’s ironic because what, in the end, do parents really want?” said Andrew Delbanco, the American studies professor at Columbia. “They want their children to be happy. And I don’t see how buying into the college admissions process is accomplishing that.” I don’t, either. And I have two particular complaints about the mania that I’d perhaps put above others, two primary reasons that I wish kids and their parents wouldn’t be drawn into it. The first is this, and it’s an echo of Scott Pask’s lament and of one of William Deresiewicz’s concerns: The mania’s focus on such a limited number of acceptable outcomes, coupled with its attention to minutely detailed instructions for achieving them, suggests that life yields to meticulous recipes. That’s a comforting thought but a fraudulent one. The second reason is that the admissions mania perverts the true meaning and value of hard work, encouraging such effort in the designated service of a specifically defined goal, as a pragmatic bridge from point A to point B, not as an act of passion, not as a lifetime habit, not as a renewable resource, which is what it should be and how it bears the ripest, sweetest fruit. Speaking of recipes, Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign strategist, told me that his interactions with students at elite colleges over recent years had given him a set of impressions about them much like Hiram Chodosh’s. “I’ll talk to a group at Stanford and I’ve spoken at the Kennedy School at Harvard on any number of occasions,” he said. “You have a bunch of hyperambitious kids, and they’re nice kids, they’re earnest, they’re engaged. But they have their notepads out. ‘How did you get where you are?’ They’re almost looking for you to give them a formula: ‘On Day 246 of your career, you should do this.’ I said to one kid, ‘I’m going to give you a piece of advice. You should go and get a job working on a sailboat in the Caribbean for six months. Or maybe work behind a bar.’ He was shocked. And I said, ‘I’m serious as a heart attack. Life isn’t reduced to a formula. Luck enters into it. It’s a chance event.’” As for hard work, that’s what nearly all of the most accomplished people I’ve interviewed attribute their achievements to. They sometimes call it different things, dress it up in different semantic finery. But it’s always there in the gist of what they’re saying, the cream of their advice, and the work they’re talking about isn’t the narrowly targeted kind that goes into anything as prosaic as an SAT score, a science project or an essay. They’re talking about something that overarches all of these and is sustained well beyond them. It’s what Sam Altman of Y Combinator identified when I asked him what distinguished the entrepreneurs behind the startups that took off from the ones behind the startups that went nowhere. He said that what mattered most in the end was a true, deep attachment to whatever you’re making, whatever you’re selling, whatever you’re doing. He praised intensity and stamina. “Sheer determination” was how he put it. It sounded to me like a synonym for hard work, which is at the very least a component or by-product of it. It was about a week after my phone conversation with him that I happened to meet and have drinks with Britt Harris, the rich financier who teaches the “Titans of Investing” course at Texas A&M, his alma mater. He told me that largely because of the Titans class, he had given extensive thought to the real secret of the most successful people. Ambition? Sure, they all had that, but many unsuccessful people did as well, and sometimes in greater measure. Competence? Yes, but that doesn’t take a person all the way to the top. Mentors? Those helped, and anyone who finds a shrewd and generous one should by all means make the most of him or her. But mentors weren’t the decisive edge. Harris shared his conclusion with me by recounting a guest lecture that he’d given to a hundred or so students at Princeton about five years ago. He told the students that he was humbled to be appearing before them and conceded as much, saying to them: “Your level of intelligence is literally off the charts. I want to admit to you—and this is not false humility—there was never a day in my life when I could reasonably be considered to be accepted into Princeton. I would have rejected myself! “I’m in my fifties,” he recalls telling them. “I’ve run seven relatively important organizations, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have people from Princeton work for me. But I’ve never worked for somebody from Princeton. How do you explain that?” He then gave them his explanation for it: “I’m fully engaged. If I decide to get involved, I’m all in. Every day is one hundred percent.” That’s his greatest asset, he told them and, later, me, explaining that a robust and lasting energy for hard work is always going to be more consequential than any college. Few of the parents I know would dispute that. Most feel it in their bones. It’s common sense. And that’s exactly what the college admissions mania squeezes out of us. It makes us forget what we inherently know. We know, for instance, that many people hit their strides late in life—later than college, sometimes by decades—and that who they are when an admissions office evaluates them and even who they are when they finish their higher education isn’t who they’ll be years later. We know that extrapolating too far from the present into the future is a fool’s game: At different times, we’re different versions of ourselves. One version exists on the cusp of college. There will be other versions down the road. And they’ll be dealing with circumstances, professionally and personally, that we can’t begin to imagine. We know that many of the attributes that best position someone for professional success—and for contentment, which isn’t the same thing—aren’t fully reflected in a high school transcript or easily distilled in a college admissions application. Many people flourish in their careers and their relationships because of the buoyancy of their spirits, their talents for establishing a positive rapport with everyone around them and the emotional wisdom with which they separate what’s vitally important from what’s not. Their gift isn’t their measurable intellect but their personality, and while it may come through in better grades and flattering references from teachers who take a shine to them, or in leadership positions attained by dint of their popularity, it’s probably not going to show up as readily in the material that an admissions officer evaluates as other, more quantifiable gifts do. We know that people are often defined as sharply by setbacks, and by their responses to them, as by getting what they want when they want it, including a “yes” from Yale or a welcome from the University of Chicago. One of the most potentially meaningful aspects of the college admissions process is, in fact, rejection. And that’s partly because college is, or should be, disruptive. It’s about becoming a new person, not letting the ink dry on who, at seventeen or eighteen, you already are. In that sense defeat can be a springboard. And figuring out how to rebound from disappointment is infinitely more beneficial than any diploma. We also know, or should know, that by infusing the choice of a college with so much anxiety, we’re taking an exhilarating crossroads and turning it into something sour and sinister and gratuitously injurious. Going to college: That phrase—that adventure—has lost some of the thrill it once had, and not just because so many Americans now pursue higher education, making it a more routine occurrence. No, we’ve sucked some of the magic from college by letting college get sucked into our tedious, soulless preoccupation with status. But not entirely, at least not yet. And that’s what keeps Tara Dowling, the Choate college counselor, moving forward, despite all of the parents who ask her why their kids didn’t get into an Ivy, despite the cynical games that some students play, despite their insistence on looking past and down on so many terrific but underexposed schools, despite every other facet of the frenzy. “Every year I ask myself: ‘Do I want to do this again?’” Dowling said. “‘Do I want to do this one more year?’ But in the end, as a first-generation college student who got no help from a counselor and whose life was changed by college one hundred percent, I believe in the transformational power of higher education and the self-awareness and self-actualization that comes from the process of applying to college.” If students are steered through it correctly, if at least some measure of calm can be made to prevail, “kids become aware of who they are,” she said. “Kids become aware of what they want. I love being part of that process: watching the light bulb go on, watching them work their buns off. And in the end they all go to college, and their lives are changed.” There’s something else we know, and it’s the forgetting of this that’s perhaps most curious, and saddest. We know that where we go to college will have infinitely less bearing on our fulfillment in life than so much else: the wisdom with which we choose our romantic partners; our interactions with the communities that we inhabit; our generosity toward the families that we inherit and the families that we make. We know that no college can compete with getting any one of those things right, let alone getting several or all of them right. Then the admissions process comes along, and it shoves all that knowledge to the side. That’s what baffled and horrified Susan Bodnar. Epilogue You met Bodnar in an earlier chapter. She was the one whose son, Ronen, was rejected from an elite preschool. It was his frog that was only hopping. When I corresponded with her in the spring and summer of 2014, as Ronen finished his junior year and began his summer break before senior year, she told me, “It feels a bit like that right now. His frog is only hopping.” We were on the phone, and it was one of Ronen’s last days of school, and he was awaiting word on a final paper in an English class for which he desperately wanted an A-minus. He feared that he’d get only a B or B-plus. Because English was supposed to be one of his strengths, a B or B-plus wouldn’t look good to an Ivy League school. “My son is texting me his final grades right now,” Bodnar said at the start of our conversation. Her voice was tense. She knew that. She apologized for it. She hated herself for being so wound up but she wasn’t sure how not to be. She vowed to stop mentioning the imminent English grade. She repeatedly broke that vow. “He’s going to get a B in English,” she predicted. “His first B. End of his college dreams.” Ronen goes to Manhattan’s Trinity School, which I mentioned earlier in terms of its low kindergarten acceptance rate. His sister, who is younger than he is, goes to Horace Mann, another private school in New York City’s “Ivy Preparatory School League.” But Bodnar, a psychologist, and her husband, a technology researcher, don’t have the kind of money that Trinity and Horace Mann cost; both kids are on half scholarships. And up until Ronen’s junior year, she took pride in not leading a life as posh and pampered as so many of the other families with children at those schools, at not participating in all of their expensive rituals, at having to find ways at home to economize, like most Americans do. For their vacations, the family doesn’t go to fancy resorts. They hike and camp. Dinners out in restaurants are rare. “I cook all of our meals,” Bodnar said. And while other families turned to caterers and decorators for their kids’ birthday parties, Bodnar felt that she could do as well with her own efforts and ingenuity. “There was a way that we felt we were on some sort of equal footing, and everything was hunky dory,” she said. Then, she said, “It was like someone skied into me and I was knocked on my face.” What happened was all the junior year talk at Trinity about college admissions. Belatedly, she realized that the families and kids around her and Ronen had been doing all of this concerted prepping, all of this vigorous strategizing. She also had her eyes opened to just how unforgiving the odds for getting into the most selective schools had become. Ronen was an exemplary student; she’d always assumed he’d go to the school of his choice. But exemplary wasn’t good enough anymore. She said that as summer approached, “one friend said to me very casually, ‘My son is going to Yale for pre-law for a week and then studying (acting) with Stella Adler for four weeks and then going to Harvard for a pre-med program.’ He’s between his sophomore and junior years. You hear that and you shrink. You just shrink. My son’s going to music camp, again, for the fourth year, because he really loves music.” Trinity provides dedicated SAT tutoring for small groups of its students, and Ronen had of course participated in that. But he didn’t do an additional private tutor: That was outside the family’s budget and their sense of how much privilege and entitlement anyone should exploit. Ronen was already going to what was considered one of the finest secondary schools in New York City. All these add-ons seemed sort of obscene. Still, Bodnar wondered: Had it been a mistake not to sign her son up for them, to figure out a way? For instance, she said, “It never occurred to us to put him in a Saturday pre-college program. It turns out that’s a big deal. And there are people in the summertime who aren’t hiking or camping but going on world community-service trips that cost a lot of money.” But not Ronen. “We just don’t stack up,” she said. “We’re just not going to stack up.” She’d never thought that way before, she said, and she didn’t want to think that way now, but she also wanted her son to have every option in life and, yes, every advantage, including a school with a name that snapped people to attention, at least if that was the school he preferred. And she didn’t want him doubting himself or feeling hurt. But they were hurtling toward a junction that seemed designed to diminish him. “Suddenly we have been transported to an alternate universe known as the potential applicant,” she wrote to me in an email. “We speak a new language with words like legacy and diversity and institutional priorities and Ivy League. Suddenly our son is being looked at through rubrics, assessments and cutoffs.” She didn’t want Ronen to buy into all of that but wasn’t sure how to responsibly pull out of it. “We don’t know how to get off this train,” she continued. “I haven’t slept since we went on our college tours during spring break. I wake up crying and hurting. I’m considering medication. Yes, me. Ms. Natural, who never even takes cold medicine.” What Bodnar found especially odd about her susceptibility to all of this was that she saw, in her very own psychotherapy practice, how damaging it could be when a kid was allowed or encouraged to become too invested in the admissions game and its results. She treated young people in their teens and twenties who’d been pulled into “the vortex,” as she called it. “It’s like we are mass-producing perfect robots posing as kids,” she wrote to me in one email. And on the phone she said, “They have no space to be kids. They’re not feeling that the work they’re doing is their own. They’re succeeding, but it’s not coming from within. And they’re having a lot of psychological problems because of it: obsessive-compulsive disorder; freaking out because they’re not perfect.” She wondered aloud about some of the blackout drug-taking and binge drinking that’s happening on college campuses. Were the roots of it in the high-pressure, overprogrammed secondary school experience that a kid doggedly pursuing the most elite colleges has? The possibility spooked her, so she was working on some kind of balance. She was trying to celebrate Ronen for who he was, whether it turned out to be admissions bait or not. She was reminding herself that a place like Harvard or Princeton or Yale probably wasn’t even right for him. “He’s not an alpha male,” she said. “He loves the woods. He loves poetry. That kind of school could be a disaster, not a boost. So who knows? Where’s he going to feel happy? Where are they going to like him? We’re telling him: Be honest. Be yourself. His Common Application essay is going to be about his joy of being in the wilderness. Is that going to be a winning essay? Probably not. But it’s who he is.” The verdict on his English paper did arrive before the end of the phone call during which she’d been waiting for it. He got a B-plus, which would also, then, be his grade for the course. The next day, Bodnar emailed me and told me that Ronen had come home “angry with himself for failing” to do better. “He believed he failed his passion,” she wrote. “He is 16! “This is what we told our son,” she continued, and in her message I heard echoes of the reassurance that Diana Levin had given her son, Matt, the boy who’d fantasized about Yale, Princeton and Brown but was heading off to Lehigh instead. Bodnar said to Ronen: “This is not the end of your journey. This is a learning experience. You will be better at whatever college you attend because you have had this experience. You still have time to develop the competence to match your passion. It will happen. Trust your inner voice and one day it will match up with what you can demonstrate on the outside. Do not give up.” Here is what I would like to say to her: Those very words prove that your son has something so much more essential and nourishing and lasting than whatever he’s going to get on whichever campus becomes his home, because that’s only his temporary home. You’ve given him his real home, the one he had before college and the one he’ll have after, and just look at all that it brims with, and consider all that it will bequeath him. You once told me that when he and his sister and you and your husband go camping, you not only “talk a lot” but “sing together.” Ronen will always have that music. You once told me that for you and your husband, your family “has been the center of our existence, and our love for our children our heartbeat.” That rhythm will forever be his. So will the wilderness and so will poetry, so long as he isn’t permitted to lose sight of them. You told me that “enthusiasm inhabits his every gesture.” If that stays true through this crazy college crossroads and remains the case beyond it, he’ll be a graced man. Probably a happy one, too. Acknowledgments If I named all of the people who helped me in some way—with interviews, with suggestions, with encouragement, with friendship—I’d need pages and pages. I hope that all of you know who you are and that you have my gratitude. I’ll confine this very short list to those people without whom this book simply wouldn’t exist. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Tom Nickolas, Elinor Burkett, Jennifer Steinhauer, Alessandra Stanley, Gail Collins, Trish Hall, Andy Rosenthal, Barbara Laing, Anne Kornblut, Campbell Brown, Ben Greenberg, Maddie Caldwell, Jamie Raab, Lisa Bankoff, Robert Niles, Alex Halpern Levy, Susan Bodnar, Diana Levin and my uncle James Bruni, the educator in the Bruni clan. Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital. 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Welcome Dedication Introduction One: The Unsung Alma Maters Two: Throwing Darts Three: Obsessives at the Gate Four: Rankings and Wrongs Five: Beyond the Comfort Zone Six: From Tempe to Waterloo Seven: An Elite Edge? Eight: Strangled with Ivy Nine: Humbled, Hungry and Flourishing Ten: Fire Over Formula Epilogue Acknowledgments Newsletters Copyright Copyright © 2015 by Frank Bruni Cover artwork © 2015 by Flag Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc. Jacket photograph by Kickstand/E /Getty Images All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Grand Central Publishing Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10104 www.HachetteBookGroup.com First ebook edition: March 2015 Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-455-53269-8 E3 Table of Contents Title Page Welcome Dedication Introduction One: The Unsung Alma Maters Two: Throwing Darts Three: Obsessives at the Gate Four: Rankings and Wrongs Five: Beyond the Comfort Zone Six: From Tempe to Waterloo Seven: An Elite Edge? Eight: Strangled with Ivy Nine: Humbled, Hungry and Flourishing Ten: Fire Over Formula Epilogue Acknowledgments Newsletters Copyright Directory: 2017 2017 -> 2017 afoCo Landmark Scholarship Program 2017 -> Florida Supplement to the 2015 ibc chapters 1-35 icc edit version note 1 2017 -> Florida Supplement to the 2015 ibc chapters 1-35 icc edit version note 1 2017 -> 2017 global korea scholarship korean Government Scholarship Program Application Guidelines for Undergraduate Degrees 2017 -> Department of natural resources 2017 -> Kansas 4-h shooting Sports Committee Application 2017 -> Astronomy (C) Teams will demonstrate an understanding of stellar evolution and Type Ia supernova. Bottle Rocket (B) 2017 -> Alabama Association of Educational Opportunity Program Personnel College Scholarship Competition 2017 -> Alabama Association of Educational Opportunity Program Personnel Survivor Scholarship Competition 2017 -> Recitals 2 Article 1 General Provisions 4 a 1 Purpose 4 b 2 Applicable Law and Regulation 4 Download 0.78 Mb. Share with your friends:
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